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Notes -
For those of you who've never seen Mad Men, AMC's critically acclaimed period drama set in the advertising industry in the sixties, there's a well-known scene in the first season. After protagonist Don Draper invites his boss Roger Sterling over for dinner and Sterling makes a drunken pass at Draper's wife Betty (which she politely rebuffs), Draper hatches a scheme to exact his revenge on Sterling. Immediately before an important client meeting, Draper treats Sterling to a boozy lunch of oysters and vodka, then pays off the lift operator in the company's office building to tell Sterling that the lift is out of order, forcing Sterling and Draper to walk up dozens of flights of stairs to their office. Being older and less fit than Draper and a chain-smoking alcoholic, Sterling is not prepared for this level of physical exertion, and by the time they reach the office he's so exhausted that he promptly projectile vomits on the floor, directly in front of the clients he's eager to impress.
HBO recently produced a 4K remaster of the entire series for their streaming platform HBO Max. Supposedly, something went wrong during the production of this remaster, resulting in numerous shots in which crew and equipment are visible when they should not be. And we're not talking about the reflection of a boom mic just visible in someone's glasses: in the scene described above, the crew members operating the vomit hose can be clearly seen kneeling behind the cast.
My first thought was "ha ha, how clumsy and incompetent can you get". My second thought, less than a minute later, was "I bet they did that on purpose to gin up free publicity". As Scott would say, it's bad on purpose to make you click.
I'm not the only one to have this thought, and I find it almost impossible to imagine how such a thing could be the result of an honest mistake. Consider how many pairs of eyes must have approved this thing before it was made available for streaming on HBO Max. Errors of this kind most commonly happen as a result of remastering a piece of visual media for an aspect ratio different from the one it was originally intended for: many 90s TV shows were filmed in widescreen with the intention to crop the image to a 4:3 aspect in post-production, and many directors and DPs paid very little attention to the content of the shots on the extreme left and right of the image, knowing that it would be cropped out before broadcast anyway. As a consequence, HD widescreen remasters of, for example, Friends usually make it painfully obvious when one of the actors has been replaced with a stand-in in a reverse shot. (In fairness to these directors and DPs, they had no way of knowing that 16:9 would eventually become the industry standard in televisions and other monitors, still less that anyone would have any interest in watching Friends two or three decades out from its original broadcast. How many 90s sitcoms are popular enough to warrant the HD remastering treatment? Even the idea of buying entire seasons of TV shows on VHS or DVD was unheard of at the time of Friends's original broadcast.) But that excuse obviously isn't applicable here: Mad Men was originally broadcast in a 16:9 aspect, and so is the 4K remaster. I don't know what this "remastering" consisted of: the cheap option is just to take the original video file and run it through an AI upscaling program, while the more expensive option is to redevelop the original negatives (the first three seasons of Mad Men were shot on film, before transitioning to digital for the rest of the show's run) with a higher resolution, drop the resulting video files into your NLE, then replicate the shot composition and edits of the original broadcast. This is a labour-intensive task, but not one that strikes me as especially prone to error: display the original broadcast on one monitor and the remaster on the other monitor. Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.
So, I surmise that HBO did this deliberately: they'll apologise for the "error" and promise that their editors are working around the clock to prepare amended video files with the errors fixed. Two weeks from now, these amended video files will be pushed to HBO Max. But of course, these "amended" video files will be the original video files approved and signed off on a year ago: most likely, they made the proper remaster first, then a bullshit version thereof with all of these incredibly blatant errors in.
And it occurs to me that just about every high-profile mishap in the entertainment industry over the last decade has been met with comparable accusations of having been deliberately staged for promotional reasons. When Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner of Miss Universe 2015, that was staged, or so the Internet thought. When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, that was staged. When Will Smith took the stage during the 2022 Oscars to slap Chris Rock across the face*, numerous people (including those in attendance) assumed that it was a pre-planned skit; nearly four years later, after Smith tendering his resignation from the Academy, receiving a formal ban from attending any Academy events and his film Emancipation being delayed owing to the negative publicity, I still routinely encounter people who are convinced the whole event was staged.
And I'm concerned about what this trend implies for political sense-making.
As established, I don't think the entertainment industry is above staging mistakes and blunders for the sake of a little cheap publicity. But this fact should not cause us to ignore a more fundamental truth: mistakes do happen. No one is immune from carelessness or errors. Even Homer sometimes nods. While remaining agnostic on whether the 2017 Oscars thing was staged or not, considering the amount of moving parts involved in a live event like this, someone reading out the wrong winner was bound to happen sooner or later, especially given the Academy's predilection for having the winners announced by established Hollywood lifers as a "passing-of-the-torch" gesture, people who by definition have poorer eyesight and are more prone to senior moments than younger people (when they made the erroneous announcement, Dunaway was in her late seventies, and Beatty in his eighties). Indeed, we should have a much higher prior on these mistakes being legitimate errors when they happen in live settings like award ceremonies, as compared to errors like HBO's (they could have uploaded the remaster to their servers whenever they pleased).
But there's a certain kind of person** who's extremely keen to claim that advertising doesn't work on him and he only buys products based on merit, and who can't stand the idea of falling for a publicity stunt which was disguised as something else — it makes him feel like a mark, no better than someone who eagerly replies to a 419 email. As such, whenever he encounters an event which seems to fit the broad contours of a disguised publicity stunt, he reflexively concludes that it must be, engaging in a lot of armchair theorising about how if it had been real then X would have happened, but because Y happened, it must have been staged. And a reflexive assumption that any apparent gaffe or blunder committed by any individual who works in the entertainment industry must have been deliberately, laboriously and painstakingly premeditated by the Powers that Be to garner clicks: I mean, it's not too much of a reach to see how this could push people into a more conspiratorial mode of thinking, is it? As Scott observed, it's "doing the very conspiracy-theory-ish thing of replacing a simple and direct picture of the world with a more complicated one without having enough evidence to justify such a move." A year and a half ago, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear, and the attempt on his life was immediately met with accusations of Trump staging it as a publicity stunt. Compare the armchair theorising about the Will Smith slap ("A slow walk up, an open hand slap, no stagger, slow walk back with no scuffle and no security personnel stepping in? Feels absolutely staged for publicity") with the idle speculation about blood splatter packs concealed on Trump's person and how bullet wounds don't look like that (arguments usually made by people who proudly admit never to having handled or fired a gun in their lives) — I mean, they're not the same, but they certainly rhyme, don't they? Distrust of mainstream media narratives has traditionally been a right-coded phenomenon, but in the case of the attempt on Trump's life and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, it's been progressives who've been the most vocal in their disbelief of the official narrative (granted, many rightists, most prominently Candace Owens, also have alternative hypotheses about who's ultimately responsible for Charlie Kirk's death).
To head off one obvious objection: I don't think this trend is evidence of media consumers becoming more savvy and clued-in, less gullible, less prone to falling for state propaganda dressed up as objective, disinterested journalism. Rather, it's a toxic stew of motivated reasoning, Gell-Mann amnesia and isolated demands for rigour: we've all become postmodernists when it suits us, believing the mainstream narrative when it fits our worldview and jumping to paranoid, conspiratorial explanations when it doesn't. The BBC or the Washington Post are, at once, trustworthy outlets when we agree with them and establishment Pravdas when we don't. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that any sufficiently politically active American of either stripe believes that American elections are simultaneously the most and least secure elections in the world, literally the dictionary definition of doublethink. As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning. People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory. It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".
I don't like that HBO almost certainly included these "errors" in the Mad Men remaster deliberately. For people who fall for it, they'll think HBO are incompetent and careless, and I think it's profoundly unbecoming for someone to present themselves as stupider than they really are just to get attention (and hence revenue) in the short-term. I particularly don't like that HBO will probably blame their perfectly qualified editors for a decision made by the executives and/or marketing department. But for people who don't fall for it (like yours truly), it's providing additional evidence for the "major media companies are lying to you and the sheeple are falling for it hook, line and sinker" mindset. It's contributing, however indirectly, to the erosion of social trust, the assumption that we cannot accept what huge media conglomerates (and large corporations, by extension) say at face value. Per "Bounded Distrust", we expect companies to make technically-true-but-misleading claims about the qualities of their products. Historically, we did not expect companies to intentionally release substandard products as publicity stunts which they pass off as the result of human error, only to release the quality product after the fact. Now that's a new item added to the "buyer beware" list.
Wait — intentionally putting out a substandard product as a publicity stunt, just so you can pull it and replace it with the product you intended to sell all along. Is the Mad Men remaster just New Coke all over again?
*Not strictly a "mistake", as Smith intentionally struck Rock, but certainly an instance of a live entertainment event not going as the showrunners purportedly intended.
**People like us, really.
If it was intentional - and these are not what you'd call healthy companies, I would not rule out a disgruntled employee - then it's to habituate you to the idea that all entertainment is fake to varying degrees. This is to prep you for accepting more AI generated content. It will cost a fraction to produce and they think they'll be able to charge around the same prices. In the industry we call them profit margins.
As always, one of my allegorical tales provides an illustration of the root cause: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TSiF2niMGpI
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I think it's pretty clear what happened...
Their normal production methods preserved the editing sheets, I can't remember the official term but they keep a map that codes frames in the final cut to individual film negatives.
So they farmed out rescanning the necessary film negatives and gave the sheets, new scans, and orginal hd versions to some shop who had software to automatically match the color timing and spit out a new final episode.
No one putting this process together remembered that Mad Men had occasional digital post processing to remove things like crew members at the edge of some shots.
So it wasn't in the budget and it was no one's responsibility.
The companies they hired underbid and had tight deadlines, so they just figured it wasn't their problem.
There have been worse screw ups than this before. There was a release of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in widescreen where they not only didn't remove crew at the edge of shots, they also forgot to darken the night scenes and tint them blue.
Things like this always happen when upper management tries to split up projects and keep costs down without anyone clearly in control of he final product.
I had completely forgotten about the "Day Walker Edition" of BtVS when I wrote my own post, but yes. I would wager that this is exactly what happened.
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Regarding the specific Mad Men example. A possible explanation that springs to mind is that while the original on-set recording may have been done in a higher resolution format, broadcast was still at 1080p and as a result the original VFX where the vomit hose technician would have been painted out were done at 1080p and the failure to re-do the paint out at a higher resolution was a product of negligence, laziness, or penny pinching on the part of the parent company.
As for the rest, I've always kind of hated the rhetoric surround the alleged "sense-making crisis" because if anything I feel like politics and culture of today are more legible to the average citizen than they have been at anytime in living memory. I don't think that the average citizen has suddenly become more savvy, so much as the pretenses have been dropped. The legacy media was never unbiased or impartial but there was a time when they cared enough about the appearance of impartiality to give someone like Billy Graham the chance to make his case. That is not the world we live in today, and a lot of the alleged "crisis" is not a crisis so much as a failure by affluent liberals to adapt to the new paradigm. They still haven't accepted the fact that they live in a low trust society.
My mind goes to The Sparrow. A novel that popped up in my "you might be interested in..." feed and that I recently finished reading. The plot is a classic golden-age of sci-fi style first contact story in the same vein as Rendezvous with Rama or The Mote in God's Eye. I enjoyed the read, and I don't want to give any spoilers but things do not end well. I do not know if this was the author's intent, but my personal takeaway from the story was that things would have played out a lot better for everyone involved, humans and aliens alike, if the people running the first contact mission had been a bit less Ivory Tower idealist and a bit more military or working class. That is to say a bit more cynical, and a bit more paranoid about things like disease and establishing a proper permitter around your camp.
If this is the case (and it sounds plausible), then presumably the VFX layers in which the crew are painted out are transparent 1080p video files. Sounds like it would be trivial to upscale them to 4k and drop them into the timeline on top of your upscaled 4k live-action footage.
Perhaps, but it still has to be someone's job to do that for it to get done. I think Charlie is probably correct that whoever was managing the remaster didn't know or simply forgot that this was a thing that was needed, nobody got the job, and nobody at that level took the time to QA the final product.
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I've read The Sparrow a few years back. If I recall correctly things go poorly because everyone beings acting like an idiot the moment they touch down. It's hard to believe that they would teach someone how to pilot a plane but not that you need to keep the grass trimmend on a runway you plan to use, for example. I didn't like it.
My read was not that everyone suddenly began acting like idiots once they touched down, it's that the Cardinal was an idiot from the start but was insulated from the consequences of his idiocy by a combination of luck and people who where more careful than he was. Two resources that ran out quickly once he was on his own.
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What's true loses to what's viral. I think the implications downstream of this are not widely discussed or understood anywhere near enough by the general public.
How can you, when you are fighting "being engaged" and the only real solution is apathy?
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Agreed. While the election denial from the left has not infected the upper echelons of the dems as much as it has infected the GOP, I am still disappointed with a lot of people from the tribe I feel less alienated from claiming that Trump and Musk had somehow 'rigged' the election. Like, come on. Not every tactic is worth stealing from your enemy. Should I mentally prepare for president Newsom to bomb shipwrecked sailors, lead trade wars, deport illegals to foreign megaprisons, and accept fantasy prizes from corrupt sports officials, or can the SJ crow perhaps take a principled stand that some things are both bad if Trump does them and if they are doing them?
That is not my main problem. The truth is the one asymmetric weapon which humanity has. Once you give up the notion that both sides should be able to form agreements about at least some observations in the world, you are conceding victory to whatever side has the fewest truth-related scruples, or which gets favored by random chance. I am not saying that this will inevitably lead to one side slaughtering the other after convincing their followers that their enemies are not really people (though that is definitely a possible equilibrium), but our ability to collaboratively form complex, useful models of nature to our shared benefit is one of the things which sets us apart from the other apes.
As a toy model, assume that every person has a cynicism slider in their brain. At zero, they behave like a person who is not aware that people sometimes lie, believing everything, at one, they totally discount the possibility that someone could try to cooperate them to improve their world model. Obviously neither extreme is a stable equilibrium for society.
But you can have societies where most people agree that most people lie most of the time, and societies where most people agree that most people are honest most of the time. And the latter kind will be much better at collaborating in collective truth-seeking than the former.
So whenever someone conspires to get the public to buy a simpler version of events than what really happened or knowingly pushes a false conspiracy narrative, they will (in expected value, at least), move people's cynicism to a higher value, which seems bad.
Absolutely. In fact, past Democratic presidents already bombed weddings, initiated many trade and kinetic wars, deported illegals and accepted various funky prizes. There's absolutely zero reason to assume Newsom - which has already demonstrated he is at the very best no better than an average politician - wouldn't do it, if only it would seem necessary to him. And I am sure, that when it happens, you will find for yourself and excellent explanation why this time it's completely different.
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This is a good comment, with one qualification:
Uhhh... Russiagate?
Russia gate was, to be clear, mostly lies, but it wasn’t election denial.
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Russiagate wasn't election denial - the leading Democrats and Deep Staters pushing it didn't deny that Trump in 2016 had won a plurality of the popular vote in states representing an majority of the Electoral College, or that Trump was the lawfully elected President. (There were some more fringy figures like Jill Stein who tried to overturn the 2016 election, which goes back to @quiet_NaN's point that "not spamming frivolous allegations of election fraud" is somewhere where the pro-establishment left is better than either the anti-establishment left or the right).
This is just not true. People like Clinton claimed Trump did not legitimately win. See https://www.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html
See also Stacey Abrams.
I mean, it's all about the definition of "legitimate". Democrat anti-legitimacy arguments were, as I understand, grounded in the theory that a foreign country allegedly deliberately manipulating the timing of media events (and/or Comey's actions) will mislead gullible Americans and thus decrease the "fairness" of the vote. That is, it's "illegitimate" in the sense that a counter-factual vote without intervention would have had a different outcome. I've always thought this was pretty darn weak, but I also think it's important to describe it accurately. It's a "illegitimacy" born of bitterness, even to people who use the word, not an "illegitimacy" as a factual debate. In popular parlance these are different meanings. I don't think that's slimy wordsmithing, it's just how people use the words, in a descriptivist sense.
Now, is claiming "illegitimacy" (in the two meanings) the same as "election denial"? No, mostly? Election denial, I feel like, is a meaningless phrase, even if I've used it once in a while as a sort of general gesture at a concept. Some people use it as "I would have won", an ego-saver among other things, while others use it as "I did win", and the two must be separated. Plainly both can be considered "denialism"! But both do not mean the same thing. I chalk this up partially to word-confusion. As I said, there are two separate concepts going on that are distinct, that our words aren't capturing very well, so I view this argument as silly (and the upvotes/downvotes as tribalism)
Stacey Abrams is a different issue, with a different debate about "voter suppression" that is much closer to the Trump case, and doesn't to me seem to be the same thing as Clinton-style denial.
Why do you think Clinton talked about 3m votes? What another other shenanigans? It’s quite clear she is strongly hinting without saying that she did in fact win.
Also, keep in mind Clinton knew the Russia shit was bullshit that her own campaigned came up with and that she signed off on.
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Nowhere in the article you link does Hilary claim either of the things I said she didn't claim. I agree she is throwing shade on the election in a way which is irresponsible, but she carefully doesn't say that the votes were tabulated incorrectly or that the law was violated.
Your claim was nonsense. You claim there was no election denialism. Yet Hillary made points about downstream votes making you scratch your head? What do you think that is? What do you think she meant when she said he wasn’t the legitimate president? Of course she is claiming the election was not on the up and up. Just because you have a specific definition doesn’t make your claim reasonable.
Hell Trump admitted that Biden was the lawful president. See he didn’t deny the election.
There is an important practical difference between "My opponent won using dirty tricks" and "My opponent won by breaking the law and/or tampering with ballots" which is that, given the laws and traditions of western democracy, one is a sore loser whining and the other is an implicit call to overturn the result. And frequently an explicit one - see 2000 in Florida (everyone), 2004 in Ohio (left-wing Democrats), 2016 (Jill Stein and a few fringe left-wing Democrats), or 2020 (Trump).
Hilary's explicit claim is "Russia hacked and wikileaked the Podesta e-mails with the intention of helping Trump beat me" (almost certainly true) and that this meaningfully affected the results (almost certainly false). It is the same type of claim as "Twitter and the Deep State tried to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and this meaningfully affected the result in 2020" (false, because the suppression did not succeed, but this was not for want of trying), not "Dominion, Smartmatic and GOPe election officials conspired to report results that didn't match the votes cast"
Being a modestly talented politician, Hilary is able to make the less explosive claim while darkly hinting to her crazier supporters that she secretly believes the more explosive one (that Russia hacked voting machines or otherwise corrupted the tabulation of the election). But she carefully avoids making it.
Here is the quote from the article:
“There was a widespread understanding that this election was not on the level. We still don’t know what really happened. There’s just a lot that u think will be revealed. History will discover. But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on about come away with an idea like, ‘Who’s, somethings not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.”
That’s fucking clear as day election denialism. Care to recant?
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The original "fake flub" was the infamous Janet Jackson boob slip at the superbowl.
Don't forget that Timberlake's lyric accompanying the action was "gonna have you naked by the end of this song."
My steelman explanation is that there was supposed to be something underneath the top that would stay in place and cover her up after he ripped it off, but the wardrobe... malfunctioned, and it got accidentally ripped away with the top, thus exposing her.
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I loved The Onion's take on this: "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV".
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"Wardrobe malfunction" I believe was the winkwink nudge term. That anyone could be expected to buy that beggars belief. It's one of the many things wrong with us all. Just say "We're sorry we did that on purpose." Or "It's a show, relax" or whatever, instead of deflection so everyone can feel everyone else is fine.
Also commonplace in Japan. Anything to preserve the 和 or wa.
(Note the very first rule of preserving wa is the same as that of Fight Club.)
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Most "low information" consumers know production is inauthentic. They are not bothered by this while they enjoy the 31st season of The Bachelor. Another segment of somewhat higher information consumers knows and considers the production (inauthenticity) doesn't end with the 31st season of The Bachelor. Production reaches into their TikTok feeds and their least favorite political party's national convention. It merges with and invades their hobbies, interests, and relationships. It reaches out and touches them when as their crush posts a new cute Instagram story dancing to some music.
"What is real?" used to be understood as an appropriate question for smoke filled dorm rooms and entertainment. It has never
~beenfelt more appropriate to ask this question than while facing a screen. We happen to do that a lot. The philosophy major with bloodshot eyes might not be able to understand, but for this segment of consumers this an uncomfortable question with uncertain answers. Production -- theatrics, marketing, controversy -- has taken over the commons. This may not be unprecedented experience, but it is probably unprecedented at scale and presence.Discernment takes a lot of energy and time. Ain't nobody got time for that. An inaccurate, but simple categorization system is more useful than uncertain consideration. The hack the nerds don't want you to know is to develop and tune heuristics. Fine, when and by how much? Who do I trust to tune if not the cool dudes who see what I can see and are like me? What is a heuristic anyway? If we feel mean we might dub this a Midwit Consumer Demographic. We don't feel mean though, so we say the path of least resistance is the most natural thing in the world. Better to be guarded by overzealous "fake" categorization than to feel duped like some jabroni. Even the most normie consumers share this perspective at times, perhaps as they read the latest Instagram story debunking junk that bamboozled unwitting others.
I don't know if the epistemic rot is worse on an individual level than a hundred years ago, but if a person wanted to host an everything is fake brainworm they've never been more able to find vindication. The algorithm, its production and theatrics, is always on The Feed. We should probably be more concerned if this segment of people didn't increase after growing distrust of institutions and the evolution of brainhacks-- institutions that do frequently earn a degraded reputation. They fuck up, spectacularly so, and it's prudent to be suspicious of actors that profit off of a fuck-up.
I'm sufficiently conditioned to tolerate a fake mistake technique or the ol' "accidental" release of a trailer. Leveraging an unplanned mistake is the role of PR, so you can't blame them for that. The same types of people, if not the very same ones, do often enough somehow, someway, end up in yet another racist race swap controversy discourse for the latest Disney publicity campaign. While there is a "look in the mirror" defense of these kinds of tactics I don't find them convincing. It's not conspiracy, it's incentives all the way down-- "accident" or not. I'll still cover my bases: the schizos are always right.
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I've believed for a long time that conspiracy theories in general are a cope to deal with the fact the people who are in charge of our institutions are just people, like everyone else, and even when competent, they simply aren't capable of being perfect all the time. When there's universal agreement that things like presidential assassinations, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks shouldn't happen, and shouldn't be able to happen, it's oddly reassuring to blame them on the malevolence of a shady cadre of global elites because if this is the case, then the solution—getting rid of the malevolent actors—is simple. If instead such tragic events can happen despite competent, well-meaning, hard-working people doing their jobs, this lack of control makes things much scarier.
I don't want to dwell on dark subjects, so I'll go back to media remastering, which is about as low-stakes as you can get. For the past decade or so, I've made a habit of chasing down the best-sounding versions of audio recordings I want to add to my collection. In a rational world, this would mean simply finding the most recent releases, since one would normally expect that the continuing improvement of technology and best practices would yield increasingly superior results. Of course, you don't have to get too into the weeds to know about the "loudness wars" in CD (and now digital) mastering has hobbled sound quality since the late 90s, leading some to believe that the earlier versions when they didn't do this must be superior, but even then the answer is not always clear cut. And even going back to the original vinyl doesn't solve the problem. With any given release possibly having dozens of unique versions, finding the best one through trial and error would be expensive (especially if you're trying to get your paws on rare or foreign issues), and there are no quick and dirty rules you can follow.
The best resource for researching this is the Steve Hoffman forum, hosted by the namesake mastering engineer known for his high-quality audiophile issues. While Mr. Hoffman's warm, buttery sound is controversial, his forum attracts people from the industry, and there's a lot of inside baseball regarding the way things actually operate, a lot of it coming from Steve's own recollections. While things have changed in the recording world since the introduction of the compact disc and subsequent changeover to all-digital recording, an explanation of how the process worked in the vinyl era is instructive on the pitfalls of trying to remaster older recordings for CD.
Say an album is recorded in 1975. The band recorded that album to multitrack tape. Once the recording was finished, the engineers mixed the album down to a two-tack stereo tape, called the studio master, at which point their role in the process ended. But the tape still had to make it onto a vinyl record. The studio master, or a copy, would be sent to a mastering studio where this conversion was done. The limitations of the format required that bass be cut and treble boosted on the record according to a standardized formula, the end user's equipment reversing this process during playback (this is why a special phono preamp is required to use a record player with a stereo). The mastering engineer would also make other adjustments so that the recording would fit within vinyl's physical limitations and make large scale adjustments to ensure that all the tracks had similar volume, equalization, etc. This resulted in a "production master" which the mastering engineer would use to cut a wax "laquer" (more adjustments were made during this process; the art of cutting vinyl is mostly lost and most modern reissues sound like crap because of it), which was plated with metal and thus became a "mother". The mother was used as a mold to create "stampers", which were sent to pressing plants for the manufacture of the final disc. It should be noted that copies of the studio master would be sent to foreign labels or distribution arms in other countries, and these would create their own production masters and laquers for their domestic releases. Both the mothers and the stampers wore out with use, and popular albums would need to be cut again for reissues.
Fast forward ten years and you're a young mastering engineer who just got a job with Major Label. Both you and your employer are excited about the burgeoning digital revolution and they want you to put together a CD release of the 1975 album, which was very popular. Since compact disc doesn't require the same compromises that vinyl did, you want to use the studio master to ensure the best possible sound and as accurate a representation as possible of what the original engineer intended. You quickly realize, however, that this will be impossible, since the record was a British release and you're working for the American label that owns the rights to it, and with your deadline you don't have time to make inquiries to see if you can get the tape on loan. To make matters worse, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the past decade means that even at home, tapes have been stashed hither and yon and no one seems to have any idea about where everything is or even what anything is, since nothing is clearly marked with anything other than a track listing. Some tapes are nth generation copies that sound terrible, one was split up oddly for an 8-track release, one has interesting mastering choices that make it sound wholly different than any version you've ever heard, several are okay, several are Eq'd for vinyl and will require processing to make usable, and one has "DO NOT USE!" written on the box in magic marker.
Of course, the one with cautionary language was the best sounding by far, and in your time crunch, you don't have time to ask questions so you just ignore the warning and master the album without asking any questions. You find out later that this was indeed the copy that had been sent over from the UK, and it was marked Do Not Use because it wasn't a production copy with RIAA equalization and if it had been used to cut a lacquer it could have ruined an entire pressing. Six years later no-noise is invented and the label wants to release a "better" version that takes advantage of the new technology to eliminate the tiny amount of tape hiss audible on the CD issue you made. But by this time you've moved on and the engineer, in a time crunch, takes the warning literally and uses an inferior copy that requires him to crank the noise reduction up to 11, absolutely killing the recording. Your original remaster was fine, and any benefits of additional noise reduction would have been dubious at best, but this new improved version supersedes the old one and is now the only thing available in the US market. Then ten years after that the British label decides to do a global deluxe edition touting that it was "from the original master tapes", which was true, except by now the loudness wars are in full swing and the whole thing is compresses to shit.
Meanwhile, back in 1986 the British label exec decided that the CDs should sound as close to the original albums as possible, and specified that the production masters should be used. The Dutch couldn't find their own tapes, so they requested the master tapes from the British label, and were given the actual master tapes for their 1989 domestic release, which is clearly superior to every other available release, but they started using the US mastering 2 years later. So now you're looking to buy the CD and you're confronted with a bevy of options. The 2002 global release is available in any store but sounds harsh and overcompressed. It's an ear-bleeder. The 1991 US version is readily available on the used market but sounds even worse. The old British version is easily available and sounds okay but not great. The original US version is kind of hard to find and sounds better than the British version but still has its problems. And the 1989 Dutch version is obviously the best, but it was only in production for 2 years and used copies go for top dollar.
The point of all of this is that no one intended for there to be a whole bevy of crappy releases. Record companies had discovered a gold mine in reselling albums their customers had already bought, and to do so they had to tout some improvement over the previous sound. So they latched on to anything they could find that was technically true, regardless of whether it was the best possible version or even an improvement over the original vinyl. I highly doubt the Mad Men errors were part of a cynical ploy to drum up publicity through a fuck up, because I don't see what they have to gain. The show is from 2007 so it's not like anything is going to require a great deal of restoration. The whole 4k thing is a marketing gimmick because the benefits over 1080p are dubious to begin with on most televisions, and are completely obviated by whatever lossy compression algorithm they're using. As long as it's technically in 4k they haven't lied, and the goal is to get the product out as cheaply and quickly as possible. They probably sent out the wrong files to production, or raw, unedited files, and asked for a conversion into 4k, and didn't bother to verify anything. This isn't a restoration that's done frame by frame but a combination of computer upscaling and rescanning film at higher resolution. They weren't paying anyone to pick over all 100 hours or whatever with a fine-toothed comb.
So there were obvious mistakes, but they'll be fixed in a week, and nobody will care or even remember after that. I certainly don't think a significant number of people are going to subscribe to HBO Max now because they didn't know about the 4k version of Mad Men, at least not enough to doubling production costs.
Bingo, got it in one. A LOT of human behavior makes a lot more sense when you frame it as "wanting to be in control". Including believing things that imply control is possible. Add in some "fundamental attribution bias" and boom, you've explained a great deal of weirdness in our pyschology.
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It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.
I have a 4k TV and sometimes "4k" really does look better, and other times it doesn't. For a while, I was assuming that some sort of compression algorithm behind YouTube was the culprit. A friend suggests that the 60 FPS versions are what I see as better, not the resolution. I am not an A/V-phile. What's "real" 4k versus not? Do I really get more if its 60 FPS. Are there .... more FPS out there?
In many ways it was worse: in analog, you lose fidelity on the original every time you make a copy. You see this a bit wit accumulating recompression artifacts on images, but professional production pipelines manage to limit this. But on film it has historically made effects shots look "worse" than others (more copies), leading to some unintuitive choices. Kubrick in 2001 in some parts did multiple exposures of the same film to minimize compositing noise (most notably the darks washing out to shades of gray), which is why it looks good even by modern standards.
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It might not be the culprit, but have you disabled "Motion smoothing"? If you're noticing a quality difference on the basis of framerate that setting is an extremely common problem that's often turned on by default to impress old people.
Motion smoothing on new TVs is absolutely disgusting
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Speaking as an old person, motion smoothing sucks. Old people are the only people who remember why that's called the "soap opera effect".
The effect of 60p is not quite the same. I'm not sure about 24p on a 120p display, never having had one.
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I don’t know what formats you are using, but if you are streaming there’s a good chance that the service is actually streaming at less than 4K resolution much of the time, even if you have it set to 4K.
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I think what @Rov_Scam was getting at is that, if you compare a 240p video and a 1080p video, the difference in quality will be obvious even if they're encoded in a lossy format like MP4. Whereas when comparing 1080p with 4K, the differences are so subtle that the only way you could tell them apart is if you were looking at an uncompressed video file.
The 4K videos being streamed via HBO Max are "real" 4K, in the sense that the image resolution is 3840x2160, but because of the lossy compression used to make them playable over the internet, most viewers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and a 1080p version of the same video file.
You can definitely tell the difference between compressed 4k and 1080p. I just picked a random video on yt: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oqxAJKy0ii4
And the 4k has a lot of details that are too small to be represented in 1080p, and on a big screen you can see them. And I know the youtube 1080p version is gimped with low bitrate, but one thing you can do is watch the video at 4k, then keep the video on 4k but change your screen resolution to 1080p. The details will be gone.
I have no clue about HBO max but at least youtube 4k has enough detail to make 4k mean something.
I believe you, but this is something I'd really like to verify with a double-blind. Some sound engineers claim they can tell the difference between a 192 kHz sample rate and 96 kHz, but I'm honestly sceptical.
Honestly for the casual viewer it's very subtle. But the eye is objectively quite capable of seeing waaay past 1080p. There's a reason that 1080p laptop displays have fallen rapidly out of favor and "retina" class screens are now standard. And why 1080p is the standard for a 5 inch phone screen.
Meanwhile there is no scientific evidence that humans can hear 192 kHz. There are some reasons that someone can pass an ab test though. The transfer function of the equipment could be such that adding or removing ultrasonic sound also affects the audible sound. This would be an artifact of the equipment and not something different in human perception. Alternatively, the human listener could be absorbing and perceiving the ultrasonic energy in a way that's different than typical hearing. It could just be that the vibration is picked up by nerves outside the ears incidentally and therefore allows the listener to distinguish the recording.
More specifically, there has not been a single remotely credible test that would even hint at finding anyone who could hear past 20 kHz. Every time that has been claimed, the claimed ability has completely disappeared when intermodulation distortion in the playback path was removed by using a separate amplifier and speaker element for the > 20 kHz part.
Even then, nonlinear acoustics is a legitimate field of study, and you might want to verify no lower intermodulation products are appearing from thin air as it were. But IIRC that's mostly with higher amplitude sounds.
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I wasn't referring to ultrasonic frequencies (I don't think anyone's arguing that humans can hear literal dog whistles), but rather to the recording sample rate.
The way sample rates work, per the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, is that in order to represent a frequency in a signal we need to sample at twice that frequency. Since humans can hear a maximum of 20k, we would only need 40k to represent that. Accounting for some additional effects that require a bit of headroom, CD samples at 44.1k and DVD at 48k. Those sampling rates weren't chosen arbitrarily, but for the specific purpose of being able to accurately record and reproduce the full spectrum of human hearing. All sampling any higher does is increase the theoretical limit of high frequencies that can be carried on the medium. I say theoretical because microphones aren't designed to record supersonic frequencies and speakers and amplifiers aren't designed to reproduce them. So all 192k recording means is that, assuming you were able to record it, the medium could theoretically encode frequencies up to 96khz, or nearly quintuple the limit of human hearing. Professionals will record at this rate, but that's because when the files are manipulated digitally having headroom prevents certain bad things from happening if they're opened and saved a lot, though I'm not sure of the exact science behind this. Suffice it to say that higher sampling rates offer no benefit to the consumer.
The story is similar with bit depth. CDs are recorded at 16 bit, but modern "Hi Res" formats go up to 24 bit and probably higher if you look for it. All this does is lower the noise floor. There's a certain amount of noise inherent in digital recording due to rounding off the last bit, and it sounds similar to tape hiss. You've probably never heard it because it's at -96db at 16 bit. By comparison, the noise floor in the best analog sources is at -70, and that's only if you're using filters; it's more like -32 db naturally. An unusually dynamic recording is going to have around 20db of dynamic range, a more typical recording will be in the 14db range, and most contemporary loudness war recordings will have less than 10 db. The amount of music that exists that goes between being so quiet you'd struggle to hear anything and as loud as standing next to a freight train is nonexistent, and the technology already allows for that. 24 bit just lowers the noise floor to -144db, which is quieter, but with the noise floor already so low as to be inaudible at normal listening levels, the extra range is completely pointless, although if you needed to record and incredibly quiet sound and a jet engine takeoff on the same recording then hey, go for it.
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People have been complaining about the quality of Netflix's "4K" offerings for a while now. But judging the quality of a video is much more complicated than just looking at the bitrate (1 2).
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Yes, Ang Lee's last two films were shot at 120 fps.
I haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter (which has been downsampled from 120 to 60 fps), the effect is weird. Somebody in the comments said that in a strange way it makes the movie seem too real by making the artifice inherent to the medium too obvious for the viewer to suspend disbelief, which is kind of what I'm feeling when I watch it. For some reason the high frame rate makes it really obvious that you're looking at a soundstage, in a way that isn't obvious merely from a 4k film shot at 24 fps.
When The Hobbit came out it attracted controversy for being filmed at 48 fps which many viewers found distracting in the same way. There was a period where it looked like high frame rates might be the future of the cinema, but truthfully I can't remember any movie since Gemini Man touting them as a selling point. This article lists a handful of movies since that one which have been filmed at unusually high frame rates, invariably 48 fps: it's quite a ways from becoming industry standard. Curiously, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was filmed at 48 fps but released as 24 fps. Wonder why they even bothered.
When you're in the real world looking at things motion will blur as you move your head. When you're watching a movie staring at the screen not moving, this doesn't happen. The upshot is that things that would blur in real life don't blur in the screen, and it looks fake. There are also issues where screen refresh rates are designed to be in multiples of 24 and not 60, which make the frame rate out of sync with the refresh rate and causes a stutter effect.
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Whoa! Yeah. I can't exactly put it into words but it's very palpable. I feel like I'm watching something that hasn't been fully mastered or edited yet. There isn't that Cinema "filter" on it that makes my brain go "Oh, cool, movies!"
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I don't think Candace Owens is any sort of useful metric here; she really is an attention grifter. Does she have fans? Honest question.
Yes. Conspiracy oriented women love her.
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Candace is probably the biggest political streamer in the world right now. In large part because of her conspiracy minded take on Charlie's death.
This depresses me more than Hasan Pikers' popularity.
I don't think it should. There has always been a large portion of the red tribe that's seeped in outlandish conspiracy theory. They have to go somewhere.
Even then, the things they believe are, to me at least, no more outlandish than believing infinity immigration is a good thing or that evolution in humans stopped at the neck.
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Per Wikipedia, over 5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel and over 1 billion views. Her Patreon says she has 177 paid subscribers which at the lowest tier works out at $3,500 a month.
She also is number 10 on the Spotify podcast charts.
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That wild difference between patrons and views screams "bot inflation" to me. There are tons of youtubers getting like 5% of that viewership who have an order of magnitude more patrons.
That Candace is an attention whore and the fact that she touts those viewer numbers to make herself seem like a big deal, and that she is a conspiracy theorist who surely assumes everyone else is already botting (many are of course, but hardly all) are all ALSO reasons to make me think her support is largely fake. I assume a mix of bot views she buys to big herself up and ones provided by China and Russia who benefit by promoting the biggest morons (same reason I assume Hasan Piker and the other craziest leftists you can think of have a ton of bots).
There are also a ton of Youtubers who don't do Patreon. I think her popularity makes sense once you factor in the Qanon market. There might very well be bots, but there are also a lot of conspiratorially minded Americans...
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Look, just because I live in a server in the basement of the Lubyanka building doesn’t make me any less of a real person than you.
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I saw a screenshot of the friends remaster on twitter where you can see right off the edge of the set.
I think they just trusted the process. The guys scanning and cleaning the film just did their jobs. Then the watchtesters got drunk and binged the series, and when it seemed on the face fine they shipped it.
There might even be a number of "acceptable" oopsies that leadership decided on. Because these days everyone wants widescreen, and if you instead crop stuff out, then other people are gonna conplain about what you cropped out. Better to give a bit of behind the scenes sneak peak instead.
Why did they remaster friends? Serious question. It’s a sitcom. There are no special effects or panoramic vistas. ~no one watches it for the costuming. On a deep and fundamental level, who cares.
Unless it’s just copywrite extension.
People have this stupid idea that a 16:9 aspect ratio is "better" than a 4:3 aspect ratio, and don't like watching movies or TV shows with black bars on either side of the image.
The obvious thing to do would have been to release a HD edition of Friends, but retaining the original aspect ratio it was intended to be broadcast in when it was filmed. But it seems the market decided that because a 16:9 edition of Friends was possible, it was therefore preferable to the original 4:3 edition, even if the 16:9 edition includes loads of distracting elements that were never intended to be displayed onscreen at all.
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It's just annoying to watch a fuzzy mess on a big screen tv
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They rewrote the plot to include a sly, crafty mountain?
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But as I said in the OP, that can't be the cause of the error here: the original HD release of Mad Men was widescreen out of the gate. It's not 4:3 being upscaled to 16:9, it's 1080p 16:9 being upscaled to 4k 16:9.
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I think you overestimate the attention to detail people have. There's a bluesky thread here full of mistakes in AI-generated captions on anime from Crunchyroll. I cannot believe a human fluent in English read all of these along the lines they are supposed to caption and signed off on them. You would think a very simple and fundamental step in review would be "and then a human reads the caption alongside the line it's captioning" but no! Clearly not!
To take another example, in a legal filing by Anthropic their AI messed up a citation to a journal article. The AI got the journal, page number, and link all correct but got the title and authors wrong. The attorney's declaration was very clear that if you went to the link the citation provided it was the correct article (with correct title and authors). You might think a step in verifying an AI generated citation includes "do the cited title and authors match the actual ones" but, again, apparently not!
Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler and hit publish on the result, without any human sitting down and watching it all the way through.
That can't have been what happened, because the vomit hose guys weren't visible in the original 1080p episode. Ergo, one of two things must have happened:
If they'd upscaled the original video using an AI upscaling tool, you would've doubtless seen some weird upscaling artefacts and colour correction — but if the hose guys weren't visible in the input file, they wouldn't have been visible in the output file. An AI upscaling algorithm will invent visual artefacts, but it's not going to spontaneously hallucinate crew members standing behind the actors.
I intended to convey something like (2), appreciate the clarification.
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I was around for New Coke, and I don't remember it feeling like a publicity stunt. They really were pushing it as the new, improved formulation. That people hated it wasn't the problem, it was that enough people hated it so much that they stopped buying Coke. Hitting them in the wallet forced the re-introduction of 'Classic' Coke, and even there, that rebranding ("This is the original version, the classic one") was necessary because people didn't want to buy the new version by mistake.
So maybe HBO did this clever stunt. Or maybe they actually were that stupid. Maybe they went all-in on AI, outsourced the remastering to "overseas chop shop promising to deliver the moon with AI" and this is what happens: you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Never underestimate the greed of any company trying to wring yet more pennies out of a property, but they don't want to spend more on producing the new director's cut extended edition remastered now in 4K Han shot second sign over your first-born to us version.
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I unironically believe all these statements are true. It doesn't take schizophrenia.
US elections are not a monolith. They require every single voting district to behave well and consistently across the entire country. Some districts are going to be very competently run, and some are going to fail real badly. In a close enough election it is possible that incompetent or corrupt districts are enough to sway the election.
This is something that the electoral college protects against, since one state's messed up votes will just impact the outcome of that state, rather than the entire popular vote.
I do not understand how this is even a controversial statement. Look at Bush/Gore 2000 election, which was decided by margin of 537 votes out of 5.8 million for Bush in Florida and by 366 votes out of 572 thousand for Gore in New Mexico. I have utmost confidence that Bush won thanks to some type of cheating, which was enough to offset Gore's cheating. And it is not as if Bush was some unimpactful president. One can say that whole US history was changed thanks to electoral cheating.
The whole system incentivizes - and as the previous case shows - rewards cheating. It is no conspiracy theory to have priors in favor of cheating deciding the elections, especially if the margin was couple of thousand of votes in contested states.
Yeah, people who were not around or memoryholed the 2000 election as "Republican SCOTUS picks Bush as President" forget what the real takeaway was, which was that Miami-Dade county was a hive of scum and villainy that had been doing shady things for decades to tilt its results in the direction of Democrats. It took such and embarrassing display for the state government to get cajoled into fairly authoritarian measures to force them to actually run their elections competently and fairly.
It beggars belief that anyone would really think that places like Vegas, Philly, LA, Atlanta, etc don't have similar problems. To put it bluntly, if you don't have votes fully tallied within 12 hours of polls closing you are so grossly incompetent, or are intentionally manipulating vote totals, that none of the votes in your jurisdiction should be treated as legitimate.
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Er, no, the electoral college makes this problem worse. It serves to magnify the votes of certain districts over others, and it's often well-known which ones are the important ones (e.g. flipping a California district makes zero difference, flipping a Florida district is enough to change W to Gore). With the popular vote, it really requires a massive effort to shift the result by a few percentage points. With the electoral college, you just need to "fortify" the vote in a few well-chosen places.
Mind you, I still don't believe the 2016/2020/2024 elections were invalid (despite America's uniquely insane lack of voter ID). You'd still need a pretty large conspiracy to actually commit fraud at that scale, AND you'd have to overshoot, because you'll be wrong on some of the districts that you think will be "important".
Furthermore, democracy's most important feature is just to make government answerable to the will of the people. That survives even if every person on the [left/right] with 49% support will get frauded up to 51%. They're still reliant on that 49%; it doesn't make them an omnipotent dictator.
Note that this is by the choice of the states. Two states divide their EC votes in ways I think are probably better, but the game theory is that for each state, first-past-the-post maximizes the utility of marginal local votes, presumably maximizing the attention (up to and including "pork") that politicians give to them, especially in swing states. I think unilateral disarmament there probably requires Congress to force them all to do it together.
OP's point was that the EC distributed vote count is robust against single points of data corruption: each can only swing state outcomes, not national. Related: I think the Interstate Popular Vote Compact would only last until some state (maybe not even a party) threatens to certify ten billion votes, and challenge the standing of other states to question its counting ability.
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Hmm we might both be right here.
What I meant by making it harder is that if you have a candidate that is crap and gonna lose 40 states, you need to commit probably 20 different instances of election stealing to have a safe outcome.
If the candidate is going to lose the popular vote by two million you just need to commit enough fraud in LA and New York to swing the election.
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You're being reasonable, cjet79. What I want is to laugh at the people online who were staunchly swearing up, down and sideways that the 2020 election was the bestest, most secure, safest, most honest election ever and that there wasn't even the teeniest-weeniest possibility of fraud, hacking, or error and who then swung to the opposite side about 2024 with evidence that the same voting machines which were impregnable in 2020 were leaking like colanders in 2024.
I went to the trouble of looking up the Maricopa county results in 2020 which seemed, on the face of it, to be suspicious. No need for fraud, just a tiny swing in votes was enough to flip from red to blue.
So there could be several such instances, as well as common error and yes, even perhaps some scattered fraud here and there. But nobody wants to hear that. When Our Guy won, it was the best election ever. When Their Guy won, it was fraud and foreign influence.
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I saw what happened in Broward County in Florida during the 2018 election, and the aftermath.
That was a close enough election that one County could have flipped most of the races. Probably did, in one case.
Since then, I refuse to discount the possibility of wanton fraud as a factor nationally anymore.
It is arguably a glaring, Death Star-esque weak spot in our National Democracy that the actual sanctity of vote counts is reliant totally on local officials who are not beholden to some larger national standard/oversight. We'd hope that with enough voter participation all the fraud will end up being a wash, but the challenge is that one party has control of the districts in large cities where larger scale fraud is easier to hide, while the other has a coalition based in less populous but overall more numerous localities.
Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots. The only irregularity which goes to the correctness of the results is the discrepancy in precinct ballot tallies, with about 800 (0.1%) more votes in the boxes than there should have been.
Incompetence which is almost certainly non-fraudulent but which opens a 0.1% margin of fraud in an unusually bad county doesn't point to a possibility of wanton fraud on a nationally (or even statewide) significant scale.
That does not, of course, make it acceptable and everyone involved with adminstering that election should have been (and, as far as I can see, was) fired.
Yes.
And if the incompetence is significant enough, that's precisely where someone would hide the fraud.
The money quote literally says:
Add that to the issue:
And that's precisely the place you'd want to look for fraudsters. But oh so luckily the process was so badly done that we can't really determine what the numbers should be.
If you're trying to swing elections, you WANT there to be enough plausible deniability that the numbers can't be directly challenged. Can't do that if things are well-run and accurate.
But its REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLYY convenient that the places where the 'incompetence' is actually so serious all tend to trend the same way on election night.
For 2018, if you add Palm Beach and Broward together (they are adjacent counties, BTW) there's about 1.3 million votes recorded between the two of them. It would be feasible if not likely to hide 10k-30k false votes in there if spread around enough, which as mentioned would be enough to swing the Senate race and several of the state-level executive races.
There's an "easy" solution to to this, just toss out all the votes for the precinct if it happens, maybe allow for a margin of error, like one or two more ballots than voters is okay, but more than that means the precinct doesn't get counted.
If this county's elections operate like mine, everyone working at the precinct is a volunteer from the local area, maybe further if they don't have any volunteers locally. Either way, communities that can't secure their elections shouldn't get their votes counted.
This nearly happened at my precinct in 2024. Guy manning the voting machines wasn't paying attention and nearly let someone cast their ballot and walk out with their voter card, thankfully we caught it before she left the precinct.
I see the risk factor being malicious actors throw the count off to get certain districts disqualified.
It is such an odd situation, you can't really train many 'professional' poll managers for an event that happens like one day every two years.
So we rely on volunteers with minimal training and small motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty.
It sucks that this once again seems like something trivial to do in a 'high trust' society. But as trust degrades suddenly it becomes almost intractable.
Yeah, I think that's definitely a risk, though I'm hoping after a few elections of tossed out results the community would be more inclined to pay attention, and if they're not, well, I personally won't be too put out if their vote doesn't count in national elections anymore.
In theory it should be pretty obvious if someone tries to scan their ballot at the voting machine multiple times, you just need the guy standing next to the machine to be watching. Of course, it means the election results kind of hinges on him paying attention, but you can assign multiple people to that job if it really becomes an issue.
Volunteer quality is going to depend heavily on the precinct. I live in a fairly well-off neighborhood in a pretty wealthy county, and the election work pays less than minimum wage, and the more important jobs (such as being in charge of the entire precinct) basically require you to work the entire 12+ hour day. The only people willing to do it are going to be at least somewhat motivated to have their community's votes counted, there are much better ways to spend your Tuesday otherwise.
In my precinct, the scanners don't give the ballot back to you --- it goes directly into a box that gets retained for recounts and hopefully random sampling. They also scan both sides so it doesn't need to be a specific orientation.
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Yep.
Maybe if we don't want centralized control over vote counts, we could still have some central FedGov fund for paying the election expenses of given districts so long as they meet certain standards and can pass an audit.
And maybe those that fail, rather than toss out that election's results, the punishment is that their votes won't count in next cycle.
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I mean, seeing what happened in Minnesota, holding your hand over your heart and swearing that no political operatives or voting bloc were ever involved ever at all in anything remotely dodgy is going to leave you with egg on your face.
I expect a certain level of mild corruption in any election in any country. Right now we've got both Texas and California competing as to who can be "most partisan gerrymandering in the history of the state". So all we can really expect is that most elections will be mostly honest, with any manipulating within small and manageable levels.
Texas’ new maps are pretty far from a maximal gerrymander. Indiana, on the other hand…
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Minnesota providing an ongoing, real time example of most of the bad things that righties say happen when Democrats are in charge has been interesting to me.
Then you remember that they used Tim Walz as their answer to the Trump problem. Very odd they'd want to hold his state out as an example like that?
Kamala Harris just had no luck, or maybe no political instincts. She picked ol' Tim there mainly (what I've gathered from reading various reports) because he was willing to play second fiddle to her, while the likes of Shapiro were judged too ambitious (read: too much of a threat to her by comparison).
They wanted "redneck lite" and they got it, and now here he is: the much-touted successful smart governor with impeccable liberal instincts now shown to be presiding over multi-million dollar scamming where either he didn't know about it (doesn't look good) or it was known about but there was pressure to keep it covered up (looks even worse).
Doesn't look good for her if she's really going to run for governor of California. Then you have Gavin Newsom's social media putting out the likes of this which honestly makes my brain hurt trying to work out what the heck is going on (he was at some NYT bunfight? and there was criticism of how he crossed his legs? so this is meant to be a joke referencing that?)
That tracks.
Harris seems like the type who 'knew' she needed an old White dude on the ticket... but was ABSOLUTELY unwilling to accept someone who might overshadow her, like Newsom. She had to put up with being under Biden, after all.
When in reality, being in someone's shadow was the main thing that kept her viable.
I'm also willing to entertain the hypothesis that he was chosen in part so that when Kamala won, they could use FedGov power to cover up the problem/immunize him from consequences.
I wish they were that efficient. That the scandal came out seems to have taken Walz etc. by surprise, so I don't think there was that much forward planning around "when I am elected, as of course I shall be, then we fix your little problem Tim, now hold my handbag for me while I speechify at this bunch of white liberal women".
I still haven't managed to finish reading her "107 Days" book, but searching through it on Kindle here's pretty much why she picked Walz:
And once again, why the flip did they not listen to Bill? The guy has bucketloads of charisma, also navigated successfully the image of being a hick from the sticks, and knows how to win elections:
Also she is really salty about J.D. Vance being the rival redneck and campaigning successfully by - get this for wicked underhand tricks - being moderate in the debate with Walz! Oh, the effrontery! How could poor, decent, honest, aw-shucks Tim ever compete with some slick Yale graduate pal of Silicon Valley billionaires?
She doesn't like J.D. because he correctly forecast the election result 🤣
She (and/or the ghostwriter) is so good at making her enemies sound awesome.
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But wouldn't any kind of centralizing solution merely compound the problem? It's not like national level institutions have a strong track record of nonpartisanship. We definitely need more transparency and accountability, but the local (and therefore compartmentalized) nature of American elections is a Chesterton's Fence I do not want to tear down.
Oh, I would never suggest that voting counts need to be centralized.
My proposed solution was death penalty if you get caught fabricating more than, say, 100 votes.
Don't even have to re-do the election, just let the voters see that those who undermine it are punished.
The behaviour of the current President demonstrates that you would need to amend the Constitution to make it non-pardonable, of course - otherwise you get away with it if your candidate (for President or Governor, at least) wins.
It is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that the decline in public confidence in US elections is not driven by actual fraud, and definitely not by fraud that could be proven to the criminal standard but is currently being under-punished. It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.
Announcing that you are going to start hanging the people doing the election fraud and then not finding any of them will further reduce confidence in the system. This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.
The one thing I don't think that the architects of our Democratic processes realized was that literal Trillions of Dollars would become tied up in the outcomes that can swing with <100,000 votes.
And yet, I've lived in Florida long enough to see it go from being THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE of sloppy election processes (2000 was the year of 'hanging chads') to running effectively flawless elections that report on time and accurately. The state has only gotten more populous since then, too.
Its like so many complaints about social problems are disproven with a straightforward counterexamples.
"Oh man violent crime is complex and multi-factorial, you can't just arrest your way to safety." Why'd it work for El Salvador?
"Bureaucratic waste is inevitable, and achieving real cuts to government spending is futile because all the incentives run the other way." Why'd it work for Argentina?
"Elections are complicated and chaotic, and counting millions of votes quickly AND accurately isn't viable in many places. Incompetence will always seep in." Why'd it work for Florida?
So maybe the solution is to just send Desantis on a tour to every single state with fucked up elections and he can show them precisely what to fix.
Its clearly not non-existent. And if merely announcing the penalty is sufficient to scare people from doing it, so much the better.
That was actually the argument I made back when Desantis put together his election fraud task force or what-have-you.
Merely being aware that there's people out looking for it is a disincentive.
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I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.
Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.
Yes, False positives are an issue, but our Justice system is pretty decent at dealing with/avoiding those.
Hence why I'd put the threshold somewhere around 100 votes so we don't catch, say, some grandma who accidentally voted twice or something. High enough that a volunteer is exceptionally unlikely to 'accidentally' breach it.
I strongly suspect that after one (1) person is unambiguously convicted for election fraud and publicly executed (you KNOW that every single network would cover such an event) that EVERYONE would be aware of the consequence and so it'd be much harder to recruit them unknowingly.
And for people who knowingly collaborate with a foreign party to undermine an election... we already treat Treason as a capital offense.
If faith in election integrity is a critical piece of successful Democracy, better treat it with sufficient weight.
Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.
For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.
Well, there was a whole whole thing about Russia allegedly recruiting Trump with a pee tape or something.
The only thing that makes controlling people involved in elections valuable is the aforementioned trillions of dollars tied up in the outcomes, and of course Diplomatic/military consequences.
All the more reason to take the 'extreme' measures to secure them.
If you'd asked me this 10 years ago I might agree.
Nowadays, I'm not willing to say even a bare majority are.
But I do believe they respond to incentives! Be those incentives from malicious actors, foreign powers, or their own government.
I simply note that a lot of Election Officials don't have strong incentives for good behavior, and its probably insufficient to 'reward' good behavior on their part.
Which leaves...
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I've never done video editing, but this strikes me as the sort of human task prone to predictable classes of error. Given a decent amount of schedule/budget pressure ("this is due by the end of the week") and the number of times the same (or very similar) footage has gone by, I'd bet it'd be easy to miss in a final self-review pass. I try to avoid it, but I've managed to accidentally watch test-only code changes make it embarrassingly far into the code review process.
I can only assume TV is worse: "Watch 40 minutes of this episode on high alert for a single missed shot. Yeah, you know the entire script by this point because you've watched every second multiple times over, but you have to focus." is exactly the sort of task I'd expect myself to fail at. And I assume even worse depending on how you broke up the whole series and might be reviewing larger chunks.
I think a large team would help, but I doubt the remaster tasks are given to a large group, and probably not to the most capable editors either. How many person-hours is remastering a single 40 minute episode?
Yeah, review editing is a super error-prone process where the only solution is more eyes doing more passes more slowly, which becomes expensive to do at any sort of scale very quickly.
Boy, if only there was a technology that could help with that the movie industry would embrace enthusiastically.
You're totally correct! There is such a technology. Forgive my mistake.
I think you’ll have to forgive that the industry that could benefit from it as decided to obstruct it.
I think you're replying to a joke in the obsequious, sycophantic style of current-gen AI.
The current-gen AI that is infamous for not being accountable.
The use-case for AI at the moment are tasks that take a long time to do but can be checked quickly (such as coding tasks sufficiently covered by tests, or generating pictures of cute girls). When tasked with checking movies for bloopers, I suspect it would not do good enough to save much time.
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