Rov_Scam
16hr ago
I think he was referring to the loading speed of the site. There was a hardware problem a week or two ago that has since been fixed, but some of the lag was back over the weekend.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
My apologies for the misspelling but I'm glad you found the post! I get what you're saying with the first argument, but the same could be said about someone who shoots and misses. Suppose the perpetrator only intended to scare the victim and used a gun he loaded with blanks, and an inspection of the gun proves it was loaded with blanks and the perpetrator told several people beforehand that he was going to scare the victim. The victim was not, at any point, in danger of being injured. We can prove this with hindsight. I think we both agree that the victim would have been privileged to use lethal force, but assuming he did not, do we only charge the perpetrator with simple assault since we know, with hindsight, that the victim wasn't in any danger?
Rov_Scam
3d ago
What you're missing here, and the reason I limited my examples to cases where there is no injury, is that the actual injury is only one component of the crime. A strong arm attack can be aggarvated assault in the right circumstances, including if the injuries are severe enough. But the other component is apprehension of imminent harm, and we grade simple assault lower in this respect because of a recognition the the amount of harm anticipated by the intended target of a missed punch is lower than that of the intended target of a missed shot. If you're arguing that lethal force is necessary in cases of unarmed attacks (and with no special circumstances) where the victim is not injured on the theory that you don't know what is going to happen and the attack could result in serious injury or death, you're saying that the amount of apprehension the victim of such an attack suffers is comparable to that of someone who was shot at but not hit.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Except Biden isn't the boss anymore, and she's questioning the judgment of the people who are in charge now. If she had just kept her mouth shut then she might have had a future. Then again, maybe she knew she had no future, and figured her only chance was to criticize D leadership for the election loss.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I'm going to respond here, but I'm going to tag @FistfulOfCrows, @Southkraut, @JeSuisCharlie, @self_made_human, @zeke5123a, @ulyssesword, and @The_Nybbler because all of these comments are in the same vein and merit similar responses. I understand the concern that things like punching, tackling, etc. can result in serious injury or even death. My issue is that, regardless of the true degree of risk, it is built into the criminal law that some kinds of attacks are inherently more dangerous than others, regardless of the actual injury inflicted, and penalties for those acts that we view as especially dangerous are increased accordingly. I'm going to use Pennsylvania as an example but it's similar everywhere; suppose you have the same Hayes attack except instead of it ending with Gannon being shot, they roll around for a while and Gannon is either stopped or withdraws, and Hayes doesn't suffer any injuries. Gannon would be charged with simple assault and, assuming no prior record, sentenced from anywhere between 30 days of Restorative Sanctions (fines, community service, restitution, etc.) and 1 year of probation. By the same token, if instead of tackling Hayes Gannon shoved a gun in his face, he'd be charged with aggravated assault causing fear of serious bodily injury, with a dangerous weapon enhancement, and, again assuming no prior record, sentenced to 9–18 months of jail time.
I used examples that didn't involve any injury because the law recognizes that apprehension of injury is sufficient to invoke criminal liability. In turn, the differing severity of penalties reflects a presumed greater level of apprehension that arises from attacks involving dangerous weapons compared with attacks that involving strong arming. The law entitles one to defend oneself using force proportional to the threat. If we say that punching and tackling are threats that warrant the use of lethal force, we are saying that they cause the same kind of apprehension that being shot at or threatened with a knife does. The logical conclusion, then, is that the criminal penalties for punching or tackling someone without causing injury should be similar to those that involve shooting at someone or threatening someone with a knife or gun without injury. Additionally, the idea of sentencing enhancements for using a "deadly weapon" or firearm doesn't make sense, insofar as these enhancements do not also apply to someone who punches or tackles someone. The upshot is that all assaults would now be aggravated assaults, excepting those where the level of contact is so minimal that in most cases they are rarely prosecuted anyway, such as the aforementioned shoving in a grocery store line.
If you think this should be the case, then you're entitled to your opinion, and I'm not here to argue the appropriate grading of crimes. What I would point out is that, if this is indeed your opinion, then the problem stretches far beyond one case in Massachusetts to thousands of cases annually in all 50 states and Federal jurisdiction. Simple assaults are among the most common cases prosecuted in the US, and if every case of punching or tackling, or whatever else you can say Mr. Hayes suffered placed the victim in apprehension of imminent death or serious bodily injury then the common practice of sentencing perpetrators to probation and community service is one of the grossest injustices imaginable.
On the other hand, if you do wish to preserve the practical distinction between aggravated assault and simple assault, then you have to recognize that there are few bright-line rules that govern when a victim is licensed to use deadly force. The privilege to use lethal force against an intruder in one's home without an independent showing of necessity is one, but even it is a creature of statute that only dates to the 1980s. While not a strict rule, an armed assailant is usually presumed to be sufficient grounds to use deadly force. But beyond that, it's hard, and I'm not going to fault a prosecutor for deciding to charge a shooting when there is no applicable bright line standard that says he shouldn't. It ultimately comes down to a question of reasonableness, and I can't think of a better way to determine that question than to present the evidence to a cross-section of the community and ask them. If you can't convince a single member of a 12-member panel that you're actions were reasonable given the circumstances, then it's a good indication that they weren't.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Let me ask you a question. Consider the following scenario: The facts in the Hayes case are the same, except instead of crossing the street, Gannon stays on his side of the street and brandishes a gun in a manner obviously intended to intimidate. Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon? If Hayes doesn't shoot Gannon, what crimes, if any, should Gannon be charged with?
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I can appreciate that the risk of being tackled, or punched, or kicked, or whatever is greater than the general public appreciates. But can you tell me with a straight face that it's comparable to being shot or stabbed? Because that's the current standard. You can argue that the standard should be changed, and that's fine, but by that same token the penalties for punching someone without killing them should be comparable to those for shooting at someone without killing them.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
And it's still not to the level where one can take claims that an objective person would have been in reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily harm at face value.Why not let a jury decide?
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The issue in that case wasn't that he had an opportunity to retreat but didn't, but that the force used was disproportionate to the threat. Gannon committed a pretty clear case of misdemeanor assault and battery, but that's it. There was no gun involved, no other dangerous weapon, no immediately obvious risk of suffering severe bodily injury. There was certainly the possibility of sever injury or death, to be sure, but that's the slippery slope that people warn about and which point you're proving; to pro-gun people, any physical contact is a potential justification for use of deadly force in response. You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
Hayes was prosecuted and strong-armed into accepting pre-trial probation: he loses his license to carry, he has to take a course on "civil discourse" and he's banished from the city of Newton.
Hayes was charged with a felony and he got off with a slap on the risk. You omitted the fact that pre-trial probation means that the above conditions only applied for 90 days following the agreement, at which point the case was dismissed. Prosecutors had a pretty clear-cut case of assault with a deadly weapon and they bent over backwards to ensure that they wouldn't have to try it and that the guy wouldn't even have a record. I'm not necessarily arguing that they should have nailed his ass to the wall, but this is about as light a sentence as you can expect. As for Gannon, if he hadn't gotten shot he'd probably be facing a similar sentence anyway, so I'm not sure what you think they were supposed to do to him. You can argue that he won't have a record, but he did get shot and will likely have some sort of permanent impairment because of it, so it's not like he got off too easy.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
At first I couldn't tell whether OP was complaining about the quality of conversation dropping or how the internet ruined his own ability to engage in normal human interaction. People telling boring personal anecdotes is hardly a new phenomenon. And the timing of this alleged bad conversation (lunch on a Tuesday) suggests a work context, which means that yes, you're going to have to talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to in your personal life. Part of having social skills is being able to have these kinds of conversations. One of the things that the RETVRN people need to realize is that, if we went back to the 50s in terms of social etiquette, we'd be having a lot more of these inane conversations, not less.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
They're essential to insurance being a good idea to purchase.
In theory, yes, but have you ever questioned an insurance company's underwriting standards before purchase?
People are certainly avoiding getting legal jobs and working under the table so they can continue to collect welfare payments.
And those people are prosecuted for fraud. Here in PA, the OIG has an entire section dedicated to public benefits fraud that prosecuted between 30 and 100 cases per month, most of them felonies, most of them for making these exact kinds of misrepresentations regarding eligibility requirements. The liberal appointees running these agencies don't shy away from this, and they talk in press releases about how fraudsters divert funding from people who actually need it. People complain about welfare queens that they know, but if they have specific knowledge of fraud they should report it, just as they would any other crime, not complain about it on the internet.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Of course it doesn't resemble private insurance because it only exists to provide coverage that isn't economically feasible for the private market to provide. You listed a number of features that you see in private insurance markets, but none of them are truly essential. You mention premiums based on risk profile and underwriting, but if you found out tomorrow that your car insurance company was charging the same rates to everybody, or charging based on income, you might question their business sense but you wouldn't think that you didn't have insurance. Same with deliberate losses and loss mitigation. Not all policies have loss mitigation requirements (and when they do they're kind of difficult to enforce unless it's something easy and obvious), and the kind of fraud you mention isn't an issue the way the system is currently set up. People aren't intentionally quitting good jobs so they can collect welfare payments, and studies have shown that benefit amounts haven't affected the total number of claims since AFDC was at its peak in 1975.
The whole moral hazard aspect is priced into the system. People intentionally cause losses on auto and homeowners policies because, in many cases, the insurance payout is greater than the amount the asset is worth. If you lose your job and go on public benefits, you aren't getting anywhere near what that job paid, and most of those benefits are going to be restricted to vouchers for specific items. Hard insurance fraud wouldn't be a crime if the maximum you could get was a $3,000 voucher to use at a dealership. This is why I'm not sure what you were getting at with respect to policy limits, since public benefits have pretty clear policy limits, and they're often much lower than the actual cost of the misfortune. At the other end of the spectrum, I would add that making a claim for public benefits is significantly more difficult than making a private insurance claim. Some programs can take months.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I have to do rough calculations of this exact thing for work and reads economic expert reports that use more sophisticated analyses than I do. The only scenario where this number would matter would be if one of them dies and there's a wrongful death suit and you have to calculate future earnings. Other than that, the pension has no present value beyond the number on the check. Assuming for the sake of argument that the pension is Bill's, if he dies tomorrow it's gone. There may be some kind of survivor benefit but I don't run across these often, and when I do they're usually a lump-sum payment; it can be taken as an annuity in theory, but since it's limited to the widow if she dies the children get nothing, so it's better to just take the cash up front. If you're interested, the way we calculate the lost pension earnings is to simply multiply the benefit amount by life expectancy. Even the pros do this because it's assumed that the beneficiary will be able to get a return on investment similar to the annual adjustment. The upshot of this is that a relatively generous SS benefit of $2500/month taken at age 65 combined with a generous 20 year life expectancy only gets you up to $600,000, so yeah, quite a bit less. Pinging @Jiro and @whatihear.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
In other words, a group that was entitled to government assistance that would largely be paid for by someone else argued that they didn't need as much of it as was publicly assumed. In any other context, the conservative reaction would be to hold them up as paragons of virtue who were willing to be self-reliant and solve their own problems without the assistance of government. But in this particular context that was totally unacceptable, and they insisted that these groups accept as much of their assistance as they deemed necessary.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
That relies on the presumption that conservatives seem to have where government spending is nothing but a deadweight loss. You see this in things like "Tax Independence Day", which is the day, usually in late May, where the average American "Stops working for the government and starts working for himself". Except this "working for the government" is really just financing one's own consumption. The idea is as ridiculous as "Mortgage Independence Day", when you "stop working for the bank and start working for yourself". Well, I do pay the bank, but I'm the one living in the house, not the bank manager. By the same token, I spend the first five months of the year driving on highways and sending kids to public school and enjoying police protection and all the other things that are provided by the government. And yes, this includes all the social welfare programs that some assume are for other people, but aren't really; I voluntarily spend a lot of money on insurance that I hope to god I never have to use, and social programs are no different. Are private insurance companies a deadweight economic loss?
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Am I a parasite? I got into a car accident about five years ago that was my fault, and I received a payout from my insurance company that was grossly disproportionate to the premiums I paid during the time I used that carrier. I was effectively leeching off of every other policyholder who didn't file a claim during that time period. Thanks to the payout, I was able to buy a new car within a week of the accident. And yes, I could have afforded the new car otherwise; I wouldn't have been financially destitute, or even had to take out a loan. And there are probably people who were with that company for years who never made a single claim who were paying for my carelessness. But nobody would realistically call me a parasite; I purchased a product meant to cover exactly that situation, and I used the product for what it was for.
Now imagine a scenario where every insurance policy includes a clause where the policy doesn't cover any driving done within 24 hours of an inch or more of snowfall. Would you risk driving in that situation? Maybe you would in some circumstances, but you'd have to think long and hard about whether that trip was necessary, and I guarantee that Ubers would be hard to find and very expensive. How would this affect the economy? A lot of people say that money makes the world go round, but it would be more accurate to say that insurance makes the world go round. As a civil defense attorney, my salary is paid almost exclusively by insurance companies who are governed by extremely complicated webs of policies and splits and reinsurance and a bunch of other fun stuff dating back to the 1940s in some cases and involving policies that no one would have thought they'd still be paying claims on in 2025.
When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in. A guy who crashes a brand new Mercedes a week after driving it off the lot and bought the policy at the same time as the car is getting much more than someone who insured luxury vehicles with the same company for decades, yet no one would say that he is lucky for this having happened because he really got his money's worth. And saying that it's compulsory isn't a great argument either, because a lot of insurance law is more compulsory than you think. Insurance markets are highly regulated; I have a small bookshelf in my office filled with publications discussing all the regulations involving insurance coverage in Pennsylvania, mostly as they apply to large companies whose own welfare you rely on without even realizing it. Believe me, the insurance companies would have left half the Fortune 500 out to dry if regulators hadn't told them they couldn't.
Which brings me to my larger point: Deciding that someone is a parasite is more complicated than you think, and is usually more determined by innate biases than anything objective. Consider that most conservatives consider themselves in favor of "law and order" and all the popular implications that expression has. I don't think it's too controversial to state that poorer areas of cities have more crime than wealthier ones. I also don't think it's controversial to assume that residents of lower crime areas tend to contribute a disproportionate amount to the police budget through taxes. Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates. And I've never heard any conservative suggest that residents of poor neighborhoods are parasites because they get more policing for their dollar than people who live elsewhere.
OF course, this is because there is a broad societal consensus that crime is a bad thing at that society as a whole benefits from lower crime rates everywhere. We can say the same thing about most white collar crime, which wasn't even recognized as crime until relatively recently. In the early days of the Republic, if you went to the authorities because you suspected your accountant was stealing from you, the response would be along the lines of "That's a shame. You should consider finding another accountant." Of course, these days we expect that if we entrust people with out money that they won't just steal it from us, and that companies have certain responsibilities to consumers that they can't just straight up lie, and all kinds of little other things that we take for granted these days. If a poor person buys a bottle of cheap whiskey that in the past would have been adulterated beyond recognition but these days will result in no harm greater than a hangover, we don't say that he's freeloading off of taxes used to fund the FDA. And when Donald Trump files six bankruptcies for companies he owns, conservatives don't call him a parasite because in the 19th Century legislatures recognized that limiting the liability of investors was better for the economy than making the holder of a single share liable for the whole kit and kaboodle, and that a formalized system of bankruptcy was better than throwing people into debtor's prison or hounding them for the rest of their lives. The losers are obviously the creditors who are left holding the bag, but to a certain extent the possibility of default is priced into the transaction. In other words, we all pay a little bit for the fuckups of irresponsible business owners, even if we ourselves are paragons of success.
Insofar as social welfare programs are insurance, they're among the most efficient kind of insurance, since the risk pool includes everybody. Since it's compulsory, we already recognize that it's not going to be the kind of gold-plated payout one would expect from a private carrier. When I totaled my car, the insurance company was, by law, required to find listings for similar cars and pay market value. By contrast, even something as explicitly tied to how much you pay into it as unemployment insurance only nets a percentage of your total loss. Are there downsides? Of course. Some people will ruthlessly try to min-max their benefits, and others will engage in outright fraud, and there is an omnipresent moral hazard that reliance on welfare will lead to dependence. But these same arguments can be made about private insurance. Yet I hear no one arguing that there's something problematic about people who try to maximize their insurance payout through legal means of getting them to enforce the contract, I never hear suggestions that the existence of fraud means we should get rid of insurance altogether, and I never hear people arguing for self-insurance to reduce moral hazard (yes, people with insurance are more careless about certain things than those without, and those with insurance often only take certain precautions because the insurance companies require it).
Rov_Scam
9d ago
The issue was that they never really understood the level of systemic risk involved. The whole securitization scheme was based on the idea that, while high-risk mortgages might be too risky on an individual basis, in aggregate only a small percentage of them would default, and the riskiness led to higher interest rates. If you're assuming that a certain percentage of the mortgages are going to default over a given time period, you can price that in. They didn't forsee that there would be a foreclosure crisis that would lead to default rates grossly in excess of what was anticipated, and that this would cause a domino effect whereby the problem would keep getting worse.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
All true, and that doesn't even begin to touch the strategic issues. I don't think the GOP is going to clear the field for Vance or any other candidate, which means a competitive primary, which in turn means that some candidate would have to run as Trump's stooge, which might in and of itself cost that candidate the primary. Or Trump could run Don Jr. or someone as a crypto-stooge, but if they aren't clearing the primary for Vance there's no way in hell Vance or any other credible candidate would step aside so Don Jr. can run as a stand-in. And even if the GOP was on board with the whole scheme, it's still a huge risk. Once Trump is named as the vice presidential nominee, the whole eligibility thing is going to overshadow anything else about the election. There will also be a wave of litigation in every state to keep him off the ballot. What happens if this litigation is successful? If the entire selling point is "Trump will still be president", will voters be willing to back a stooge replacement on his own? If the outcome is that he isn't on the ballot in Pennsylvania but is everywhere else, do you find a replacement? What if the Supreme Court rules him ineligible at the worst possible moment? What if the GOP goes along with the scheme and Trump stays on the ballot in all states, but voters are so disgusted with the GOP that he loses in a landslide and the Democrats win large majorities in both houses? And sitting Republicans are primaried out next go around because of it?
There's been a lot of discussion on here in the past about why Trump always seems to outperform his poll numbers, and the most popular explanation is a "shy Tory" effect, but I think it has more to do with what I call the "Trump Constant". One of the big stories about Trump when he first entered politics was his appeal to disaffected people who normally wouldn't vote. Since they're on the margins of political discourse they don't participate in polls and they don't vote in elections unless Trump is involved, though they will vote Republican down ballot if asked to. These are the people who started flying Trump 2028 flags in January and don't really give a shit about the Constitution, or decorum, or any of the other things that Trump seems to have a disregard for.
I don't mean to toot my own horn, because this idea hadn't crystalized yet at the time, but I more or less predicted Ron Desantis's downfall when he was the toast of the "smart set" of the Republican party and of a lot of people on this board. If you remember, in early 2022 Trump's viability going forward was in question after the election nonsense and January 6, and Desantis was trying to portray himself as the future of the party. But there were still a ton of people doing MAGA. He was trying to walk a tightrope where he'd keep his distance from Trump without openly criticizing him. At the time I argued that this would only work if Trump declined to seek reelection, but that he painted himself into a corner because his unwillingness to cozy up to Trump and his image at a fighter meant that he couldn't just not run and yield the nomination. But if he ran he couldn't directly criticize Trump either, and I predicted that his campaign would turn into an incoherent mess, which is exactly what happened.
But when I made this argument to bona-fide Republicans, they dismissed it, and kept pushing the Desantis line. If the "Trump Constant" had been a theory at the time, the media and everyone else wouldn't have been so bullish on Trump, because it would have been clear that Jesus Christ himself wouldn't get the same boost Trump got, especially in a primary. He was so far ahead at the outset that he didn't even bother to debate, and he was so untouchable that none of his opponents save Christie would even dare criticize him. It was the stupidest primary election in history. The theory also explains why the GOP underperformed in 2022; by that time pollsters were making adjustments to account for the "shy Tory" effect or whatever, but they misapplied it since Trump wasn't on the ballot. Normal polling would have predicted the modest GOP pickups. It explains why Conor Lamb ended up beating "Trump before Trump" Rick Saccone (nice guy; I voted for him when he represented my district in the state house) in a District that was Trump +18. It explains why polling in 2016 and 2020 was so awful.
And it explains all this third term nonsense. Trump is convinced that the "Trump Constant" represents the majority of voters. In the past, Trump has convinced the GOP to go along with ideas that would have seemed unthinkable a few months prior. And thus far, he's proven that there are no political consequences for doing so. So it stands to reason that he might be willing to give this a try. But he has to remember that he's not invincible. He's never won as an incumbent, and for all the upheaval of 2020, it was nowhere near the level it would be if he was blatantly trying to circumvent the constitution to retain his hold on power. People in the GOP who would say that this is a bridge too far may ultimately backtrack if this nonsense becomes a reality, but Trump's only holds the office based on a margin of a few points in a few states. It doesn't take much for things to tip back in the other direction, and if he loses he will be done for good, and there's no way he is making a comeback at 86. I don't think he'll seriously pursue a third term, but I wouldn't entirely be surprised if he did.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
That's not how the worker's compensation system is set up. As @ToaKraka notes below, the abnormality requirement only applies to psychological injuries, not physical injuries. As far as physical injuries are concerned, any injury that is work-related is eligible for compensation, and most of the litigation surrounding claims is question of either whether the claimant is too injured to do his job or whether the injury is actually work-related. If you wrench your knee climbing into the cab of the truck you drive for work, that counts. If you work with dangerous chemicals and are permanently disabled due to an explosion, it counts. If the workplace was seriously negligent, it counts. If it was an unpreventable accident, it counts. If the worker was injured because he failed to take required safety precautions, it still counts.
The idea behind the system is that traditionally, people injured on the job would have to sue their employers for lost wages, and the amount of time it takes suits to go through the courts meant that they could experience significant financial hardship even if their suits were successful. By eliminating the requirement of proving fault claims can be adjudicated in a matter of weeks (and subject to appeal if necessary) and claimants can receive benefits while they're actually out of work. The employer pays into the system like insurance.
The tradeoff is that this is the employer's liability is limited to what is available to the employee through the system. So if you're in an accident where the employer is seriously negligent (e.g. there's an explosion that makes the news and was caused by terrible safety practices) you won't get a multimillion dollar lawsuit but the relatively meager award based on a percentage of your average wage. The caveat here is that this only prevents suits against employers, so if you're injured on the job due to an accident caused by a contractor, you can still sue the contractor, or if you work for a contractor working at a steel mill and a mill employee does something stupid you can still sue the mill. The added requirements for psychological injuries is to prevent people from saying that they're job is too stressful so you should pay them not to work.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
Is it really that you can't get them to do caselaw searches or that they just aren't experienced enough to know that they need to do them? I actually had to assign a newer kid some research into a motion in limine I was preparing a few weeks ago. He called me five minutes later with the disappointing news that I was wasting my time drafting it because he only got as far as the rules before seeing that it wasn't going to work, but he never complained about it or anything. But if they are pushing back on it it reminds me of a scene from The Wire where Herc calls the procedures "more bullshit" and Freamon says "This right here IS the job. When you came down here what did you expect?" Maybe it's because when I switched practice areas I harbored no delusions about what the job would entail, even though I didn't know what the job would entail. There's always an outside impression that's at least somewhat at odds with the workaday reality of any job. I'd honestly rather have younger attorneys who at least ask you what they should do. I've found it preferable to the ones who don't ask you anything and then turn in terrible work product, and then stay bad at their jobs long enough that they can't even ask some questions without eliciting "how long have you been working here?" as a response.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I can't speak to young attorneys not wanting to do real work, but I've definitely sensed a "grass is greener" mentality among several of them. It's usually that they're convinced that a particular line of work is boring and that there's something interesting and more glamorous out there. I've never done criminal defense, but I interviewed with the DA's office a number of years back and was told that the job was in the DUI division; I'd be doing nothing but drug DUIs, all day every day, and if I needed help I could ask the regular DUI guy for advice.
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that in law school you're constantly moving between different areas of the law, but when you get into practice you're mostly doing the same thing, and novel legal issues don't come up so much as novel factual issues. It's been at least a year since I've had to read any caselaw, but I spent last week going over hundreds of pages of contracting records from the 70s.
The Game, by the recently departed Ken Dryden. It has a reputation as unquestionably the best hockey book of all time, and possibly the greatest sports book of all time, and while I understand where this comes from, the whole thing comes off as a bit overrated. The first thing you need to know about Ken Dryden is that he isn't a typical athlete. His career was remarkably short for a Hall of Famer. He was 23 when he made his debut in the 1971 playoffs, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy and the Stanley Cup before he was technically even a rookie. He retired at age 31 following the 1978–1979 season. He only played 7 full seasons and the aforementioned playoffs of an eighth, having sat out the 1973–1974 season due to a contract dispute and his desire to finish his legal training, and won Stanley Cups in six of those seasons.
As Dryden didn't have a typical career, it stands to reason that he wouldn't write a typical sports book. Athletes usually write standard memoirs, talking about their childhoods and how they got into sports before spending the bulk of the time on their professional careers, and then a nod towards their personal lives and what they've been up to since retiring. Then there's the tell-all memoir, which is exactly the same as the standard memoir except the athlete has some controversial aspect to his life and there's a chapter that deals with the controversy. The Game touches on some of this but doesn't dwell on it; if you didn't know anything about Dryden's career before reading it the book isn't going to fill in the blanks for you. Instead, he ostensibly focuses on a week in the 1978–1979 season but really uses it as a jumping off point to discuss various subjects related to being a professional athlete.
Well, more like related to be being Ken Dryden, because I don't see most athletes having his level of insight, and, as I said, his experience was atypical. One gets the impression that he didn't particularly want to be a pro athlete and just sort of lucked into the job. Almost every review of this book talks about how it discusses "the pressures of being a pro athlete", and while this is certainly part of it, this aspect is overstated, as the pressure he describes isn't universal. The book's biggest strength is that Dryden is candid to a degree that was unheard of at the time. He talks about how being part of a dynasty directly led to his decision to retire, as the thrill of winning had been replaced by the fear of not living up to expectations. He talks about how players have to push for higher salaries even though it ruins the game. Most importantly, he talks about how being a professional athlete necessarily means peaking early in life and becoming alienated from having any semblance of a normal life progression. As he puts it, you go from extended adolescence to premature middle age. When he retires at 31, he knows that whatever he does with the rest of his life he will always be "former" or "ex". He realized that he didn't even want to be a lawyer but always stuck to the idea so he could pretend that hockey was just what he was doing while he could before he got his real career on track, but as the reality of not having hockey becomes clear he admits that was just an excuse.
And he's aware of all the contradictions. The book's second greatest strength is that he knows how to write, but he's aware that he has the image of an intellectual, so of course this will be expected of him since people have been calling him "articulate" his whole career. And he's aware of how image can be manufactured by both players and the media (at one point he says that if you want to cultivate an image as a theatergoer then go to the theater once after a good game and tell a journalist about it, and people will assume you're really into theater). And he's aware that most NHL players have to work hard to stay on rosters and that the ones who are good, like teammate Guy LaFleur, have a "love of the game" that he simply doesn't.
The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says. Most athletes are lucky to win one championship and don't have to deal with the expectations that come with having won five. There simply aren't than many dynasties, and even on dynasties, most of the players are only there for a short period. He says early in the book that retirement was a difficult thing to consider because he had always assumed that his playing days would end when a coach told him in the fall that he didn't make the team; but that didn't happen, and now he has to decide how and when to make his exit. Well, the same is true for most pro players; they don't make the team out of camp, or get waived, or don't get signed to new contracts, or whatever. Even the ones lucky enough to announce their retirements have usually played as long as they realistically can. I could go on, but very little of Dryden's concerns would appear to be common to pro athletes as a whole.
The other reason it's overrated is because it just isn't that fun to read. Dryden is a good writer, but he's such a good writer that he's more quotable than readable. When everything a guy says is profound it's hard to just get lost in the book. I think sportswriters overrate this because they're usually nerds who can't play sports at all and spend their careers trying to make sense of guys who live up to "dumb jock" stereotypes, so when a guy like Dryden comes along and shows he's one of them they all start drooling over his profound insights and pretty words. There are also several boring sections where he's not musing on personal stuff and trying to give one the atmosphere of a dressing room by quoting players and narrating the antics and whatnot, and it's pretty boring. Maybe when I'm done with this I'll have rated it higher, but I don't know what this book is supposed to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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