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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2268 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 4, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What is going on with sports team owners?

In the space of a few weeks:

-- The owner of the Los Angeles Lakers has been forced to sell (to a Kushner brother) the team because of an SEC investigation into financial irregularities at insurance companies he controlled. (((I'll leave the questions about the Trump admin investigating a businessman who then is forced to sell a prized asset to a Trump-family-affiliated entity to Pablo Torre to unwind)))

-- The owner of the San Francisco 49ers was arrested in an East Palestine, OH trailer park in a human trafficking sting, apparently trying to hire a $140 prostitute. He plead guilty to some minor misdemeanor charges and spent a night in jail.

-- The Los Angeles Clippers have effectively been neutered for the next 5-8 years by the NBA's decision in their salary-cap circumvention scheme, in which Kawhi Leonard was paid extra money outside his contract under the table through no-show endorsement deals from affiliated companies.

-- Investigations into the Los Angeles Dodgers are coming to the forefront, involving financial irregularities in their ownership group.

It could all be a coincidence, but it feels weird astrologically.

Moral hazard. Sports team owners get the blame whenever the team is persistantly bad (or just persistantly mediocre), and unlike coaches or GMs, they can't be fired for poor performance. The only way to force-out an owner is to catch him in the midst of some impropriety. This makes sports team owners prime targets for TMZ-style exposes.

Hearing its the 49ers owner makes that story makes more sense. The Debartolo family hails from near Youngstown OH; with good Italian restaurants. I didnt realize how much money was in certain suburbs out there, until I had a friend who said he had two kids with Ferrari's in his graduating HS class

PSA: I just want everyone to know that "good Italian restaurants" is an American euphemism for area of high concentration of Italian-American organized crime aka the mafia.

It is also literally true. My aunt suspected her new favorite Italian restaurant, only open at lunchtime, was almost certainly a mob money laundering operation, after the 4th or 5th visit where she was the only customer at noon. She grabbed lunch there several times a month for years, empty restaurant but the food was sublime. Then one week the place was boarded up.

Money laundering fronts make the best restaurants. They don't give a shit about food costs. There was a pizza joint near my a in college that charged $3.79 for an 18" cheese pizza, and it was loaded with cheese. Years later they got busted as a front.

You'd think they'd charge more so they can launder money faster.

East Palestine, OH

Where absolutely NOTHING weird has ever happened before.

Is a train derailment really a "weird" thing? It's a rare event, but they do happen.

The clippers thing is interesting. The story was broken back in September 2025 by a guy named Pablo Torre.

The league and sports media closed ranks and alternated between mocking and ignoring Torre, until it was too obvious to keep up the charade.

I feel like there's a lesson in there.

It's probably the best example of a glow up I've seen from pure journalism in years.

The owner of the San Francisco 49ers was arrested in an East Palestine, OH trailer park in a human trafficking sting, apparently trying to hire a $140 prostitute. He plead guilty to some minor misdemeanor charges and spent a night in jail.

Shouldn't he be able to easily afford a $1400 D1 escort from UC Berkeley or OSU instead of trailer trash?

This was the exact question people asked when Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots (which is probably one of the most valuable NFL franchises, if not the top one) was arrested for soliciting at a massage parlor. I still haven't gotten a good answer to this, other than that the shame around being a John likely do crazy things to people's psychology, causing, in this case, him to become stupid. Shame around sex work seems to do this in general, I think, based on what I've heard/seen about how porn actresses, Onlyfans models, prostitutes handle their work.

Explanations that have been mooted in my home:

-- It's a fetish. He wants the dirtiest, cheapest trailer park whore he can find. He can't really let himself be free with a woman of his social class. He can be totally free with trailer trash. It turns him on. I've known men who liked their women a little on the trashy side, though this is another level.

-- He's cheap, and that's how you end up a billionaire.

-- He made the utterly stupid calculation (see: Coldplay couple) that no one would catch him in an East Palestine trailer park. The problem being that when you are caught in an East Palestine trailer park, there is no possible innocent explanation, even after the charges are reduced.

Looping in @sleepyegg, @07mk, and @JarJarJedi

You need to take into consideration that York may not be the billionaire you think he is. I obviously don't know his asset profile, but it's not his team, it's his family's. He hasn't had a real job in his life other than with the team, and he's a generation removed from any inheritance. The only entrepreneur in the family was the grandfather, Edward DeBartolo, Sr., who was a shopping mall magnate. DeBartolo was the owner of the Penguins, and his daughter, Denise DeBartolo York, was the team president and an executive in the shopping mall business. When the 49ers went up for sale in 1977, he couldn't buy them outright, as NFL ownership policy precludes owners from having a stake in any other pro sports team. So he gave the team to his son, Eddie. The real estate market collapsed at the end of the 1980s and DeBartolo needed cash, and just as the Penguins were winning their first championship, he was forced to sell the team. This didn't solve the cashflow problem, and he was forced to take the company public, which led him to retire. He passed away in 1994, and the shares of the company were acquired by Simon a couple years later.

Fast forward to the late 90s, and Eddie, who had always had his hands in questionable business dealings, got in some hot water over public corruption in some kind of riverboat gambling deal. The NFL suspended him for a year, but instead of serving the suspension he decided to trade his share of the team to his sister and her husband in exchange for what was left of the family business. Denise's son Jed is at this point in college, and after a brief stint at a financial firm he took a bullshit nepo job with the 49ers. Denise gave him day-to-day control of the team in 2008, in a decision that was widely mocked due to his complete lack of any experience other than liking football. Nonetheless, he turned around what had by that point become a moribund franchise, and everyone forgot about it. In 2024 he acquired enough shares in the team to become principal owner.

Earlier this year, Jed filed for divorce. He and his wife had been living in a large house in the Bay Area, but instead of just buying another house like one would expect a billionaire to do, he moved back to a house his parents own in Youngstown. He doesn't have any money other than what he earned from the team, and he just spent a large portion of that money to acquire a controlling share. NFL ownership policy requires that final voting authority is vested in a single individual, and unless he owns significantly more than 51%, which given his history is doubtful, his net worth is somewhere north of 4 billion dollars. Since he's getting divorced, and acquired an unknown but likely significant portion of the team subsequent to his 2011 marriage, I'd estimate that he's going to owe his ex-wife at least a billion dollars as part of the divorce settlement. Ownership policy prevents him from giving her a share of the team that would eliminate his controlling interest, and he likely doesn't have enough non-voting shares to make a significant dent. This means he has to set off the settlement with other assets, but again, he's unlikely to have this kind of money, and what he does have contributes to the overall pie.

The upshot is that his attorneys are going to have to get creative when it comes to figuring out a settlement, and now is definitely not the time to be taking international flights (which would likely be private or at least first class), or spending a lot of time in Vegas, or doing anything else suggesting he has a lot of disposable cash, and there's a good chance that he doesn't have a ton of disposable cash at the moment. So you have a guy who is getting divorced after 15 years of marriage, likely never hired a prostitute before, is a thousand miles away from his kids in a town not exactly known for excitement or for having a lot of high-end call girls. So when he wanted to get his rocks off, he went online and tried to find some local whores who he could afford to pay and, at the very least, would be cheap enough that his ex's attorney wouldn't be asking too many questions about where a few grand disappeared to, or why he bought plane tickets to Australia.

It's really amazing that you can know this much about someone, though of course you may have an inside track I'm unaware of.

I only know what I read in the papers.

Youngstown isn't too far from Pittsburgh. He might have been a guest at the wedding Rov_scam crashed.

So the argument is that he is actually being very frugal with hiring trailer prostitutes considering his upbringing and lifestyle, compounded with the financial stress of divorce. Sounds reasonable. Doesn't even seem to hurt him in the negotiations for asset division, unlike a secret sugar baby girlfriend.

It's the power difference which is appealing, the money is unimportant. That D1 has a low chance of making it big in sports, or may otherwise use a college degree to earn a decent living in a non-athletic career even if she temporarily sells her body. The D1 is potentially upwardly mobile.

The woman in the trailer park is probably destitute, with little future prospects other than marrying well if she can avoid the drugs. The exploitation is what makes it erotic for him. There is likely no sexual degradation she will refuse, unlike the fit D1 who can be choosy with her wealthier clients.

Not to say that the D1 wouldn't do some degrading stuff for the right price. But it wouldn't be real degradation done in desperation, it would be play-acted at best.

But it wouldn't be real degradation done in desperation, it would be play-acted at best.

I don't know. If she walks like a urinal and she talks like a urinal, then I don't see the difference between "real" degradation and "fake" degradation.

Don't you also see the difference between a real girlfriend and a purchased Girlfriend Experience?

(What's D1? Google and deepseek fail me.)

(What's D1? Google and DeepSeek fail me.

Judging from the context:

D1 escort from UC Berkeley or OSU

I'm going to guess it's a double-ish meaning.

  1. Most selective or elite top division of a given form of labor, e.g., highest division of intercollegiate athletics: NCAA Division I.
  2. Literally, the very attractive women you see immediately attached to top-level athletes recruited to top football program schools, where there is some implication that the women were "supplied" at some level as part of a recruiting package. Especially pre-NIL money. Presumably, that supply can also be directed at other sources of demand in adjacent industry.

Edit: I see I should have refreshed first. Yeah, that is also an implication I was thinking of but failed to mention, and is a real thing.

In this case, both are purchased.

D1 is the highest college athletics division in the US. Someone from a less flashy sport like track and field might supplement her income by escorting.

More cynical people say both are also purchased in the girlfriend case. But the underlying motivation and emotions differ, and the client knows they differ, and some get off on it not unlike the men who prefer a conventional girlfriend to the one who takes pay by the hour.

Now that you said it that sounds like the best possible explanation. I was wondering about that too and I haven't even considered this aspect. For a guy who is freshly divorced (or filed for divorce) - with all the consequences to his ego, sex life and general mental wellbeing - I wouldn't find going to a sex worker something that paints him in a particularly bad light. But the manner of it certainly raises some questions.

Or a quick flight to the legal brothels of Melbourne.

I wouldn't imagine Japan is a quick flight but there is all the sex you can shake a stick at in this country, at all levels of depravity (I am guessing!), with any type of woman that interests you, from respectable college students (who whore themselves twice a week for tuition) to Office Ladies (OLs, yes, that is still a term), to trashy kogyaru street waifs, to thousands of dollar escorts, to pregnant and/or lactating women (I am not kidding, and I am sorry to be the source of this news). Of course paid sex is illegal, yes, but you're not actually paying for the sex, no; the sex is the woman's choice. <--typical legal maneuvering

Japan isn't quite the Sodom of Bangkok, but it has its moments.

Caveat: Not all Japanese women.

I thought that soaplands and the like had a strict "no foreigners" policy? In which case it wouldn't matter how quick the flight was, you wouldn't really be able to go to Japan to get laid.

This was more true perhaps 10-20 years ago, but nowadays the number of fuzoku (the Japanese sex industry) establishments that will actually bar foreigners are firmly a minority (at most they will require basic Japanese for safety reasons).

With the relative economic doldrums of Japan, the decline of interest in the sex industry amongst younger Japanese men, and the economic rises of China/Korea/Taiwan/the massive rise in Japanese tourism in general, there has been a fairly large re-orientation away from catering to native Japanese with declining purchasing power and interest in prostitution towards chasing affluent tourists with money to splash.

It's even becoming a minor wedge issue in Japanese politics that Japan is becoming a sex tourism destination, especially towards rich East Asian johns that are perceived, not really incorrectly, as a symbol of Japanese decline and national humiliation.

That makes sense. If there has been a rise in sex tourism, are there establishments which cater to that by having girls who speak Chinese and Korean? Or is that not really acceptable due to the politics you mentioned?

Not something I have statistics for, but my intuition would probably be that there's more C/K speaking girls than the past driven by increased tourist demand and foreign immigration (to a lesser extent Korean, to a greater extent Chinese, the development of foreign enclaves in the major Japanese cities is another wedge issue in Japanese politics), but that C/K speaking girls would still be a tiny minority in absolute terms, as native Japanese women are still a proportional super-majority of the population, and very few Japanese women, especially the ones that end up in sex work, are going to have the ability to learn Chinese or Korean.

I don't know much about soaplands, but I think that they are sort of the old school type of establishment. Off the top of my head I cannot think of anyone I know who has ever been to one. At least they haven't told me about it. I think I heard some American/Canadian guys in Tokyo frequented them, but that is a vague memory of 20 years ago and these guys were seedier even than the degenerates that I sometimes spend time with.

Just like anywhere, I imagine some will accept foreigners, some will accept foreigners who can communicate in Japanese, and some won't. There are various sorts of clubs, some of which make the wikipedia article and some which don't. "Delivery health" or デリヘル is probably the closest to what you have in the US in terms of callgirls, though to the best of my knowledge it is entirely up to the girl involved whether she will actually have sex. If she won't go with a foreigner you'll find that out soon enough, but there are literally hundreds of such shops in Osaka city alone. Many of them have English versions of their webpages, suggesting someone is paying attention to the tourism boom. There's at least one completely open red-light district in a rather seedy area in the south. I've been through there, the first time completely by accident, subsequent times to show people who've come to Osaka what it looks like (no one went in.) In this place if they call out to you, you're acceptable. It is total prostitution, completely against the law, but is sidestepped by various small gestures (they are "teahouses," forget about the fact that there is a girl under a lamp showing her cleavage, wearing a santa suit and fishnets, or whatever). There is within a two-block radius of this district both a police station and an organized crime headquarters with its kamon or organizational crest right out on the front door. Tobita shinchi is very old, almost like an Osaka version of Yoshiwara in Tokyo. (I have never been there, no.)

I think part of the no foreigners is probably about awkwardness and communication and the ability to negotiate and read the air, especially in a matter as delicate as whether she is going to actually have sex with you or perform some act like sumata or whatever. In every day life there is so much you have to just "get" about situations (outside clearly tourist situations) without being told that I can't imagine sitting there making a deal on fucking or not would be easy. The argument can be made that this is true in any culture, and I agree with that, but there seem to me to be many more unwritten rules in Japan than say, France. Simple, uncomplicated racism as well no doubt exists in some of these places, particularly in the older dudes who own them, or maybe there's a reputational issue where they want their bread-and-butter Japanese clients to feel they are in a foreigner-free situation. (Note I believe there are delivery health services whose roster is exclusively populated by foreign women [probably Russians or other eastern Europeans], for the Japanese man who has such a fetish. It is also possible some of these places do not accept foreigners. I wouldn't be surprised.)

Edit: There was recently--well a year or so ago--a big deal about teenage girls prostituting themselves in a certain area of Osaka proper. This made the news somehow and the city passed an ordinance where the roads there were....painted yellow. Also signs were put up along the lines of "You are important" and "Don't ruin your life." Or similar. It apparently worked because the girls no longer loiter there. Probably somewhere else. It's a strange world. Tokyo is like Osaka x100 I expect.

Thanks for the info, it was super interesting. I didn't know there was such a wide variety in the sex trade in Japan. Though of course, it's not like I'm particularly knowledgeable about the sex trade in the US, so it stands to reason I know even less about a foreign country.

I know next to zero about what goes on stateside, though I have heard the term lot lizards. The whole milieu has always seemed trashy and generally unsavory to me.

What I noticed strolling through the open genkan of Tobita Shinchi was not the tawdry squalor, but the very Osaka neat Japanese decor, the mannered behavior, and the surprising beauty of many (not all) of the girls/women sitting there. I think it would be quite something to interview some of them but I've long given up on access.

It's like one of my Japanese animes! Though I assume that a "niggers/pajeets need not apply" caveat must be inserted.

To my knowledge there are no direct equivalents in Japanese to either of those terms.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_ethnic_slurs does contain the transliterations/ loanwords for whatever reason.
ニガー • (nigā) and ホワイトトラッシュ • (howaitotorasshu)
List is seems to mostly catalogue slurs for Chinese and Koreans, with Vietnamese as a distant third.

US has several places with legal brothels, and even more places where they are technically not legal but everybody knows. And countries surrounding the US on both sides have the similar kind of deals - catering in part for US tourists - too.

A) There's Nevada between Cali and Ohio and B) brothels are for proles.

Nevada (not Las Vegas, though) is much closer to LA.

It's my impression (from a glance at webpages a few years ago) that the supply of labor willing to work in the legal brothels of Nevada (in isolated towns) is very low, leading to quality beneath the dignity of a hundred-millionaire—while, in contrast, the supply of labor willing to work in the legal brothels of Melbourne (a major city) is through the roof, with jade-like beauties flying in from four thousand miles away.

@MollieTheMare @orthoxerox

leading to quality beneath the dignity of a hundred-millionaire

As opposed to the spectacular quality of Ohio trailer park, I presume?

When I looked at the websites of two or three of Nevada's legal brothels a while ago, all the women on display were fat (IIRC). In contrast, a stereotypical trailer-park meth addict is stylishly skinny.

I am slightly disturbed by how carefully you've thought this through, but I applaud your diligence.

I'm giving a 70% chance that the absurdity of picking a technically correct but ludicrously non-salient option was intentional.

Odom in Nevada. Dave, 54, recently divorced, sudden passion for Thai temples. Or an unusual fascination with the canals of Amsterdam. All seem like more obvious choices.

No such thing as a quick flight to Melbourne. That's a whole day of travel each way.

In order to create a list item, you need to use just one hyphen, not two.

I didn't want it to format as a list, which I find annoying, I wanted it come out the way it did.

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