Rov_Scam
5hr ago
Discovery is something the Plaintiff gets from the Defendant. It's also something you get from a company, not a private person. Those statements aren't technically 100% true all the time, but realistically, that's the way it works. I represent defendants and I do send out discovery requests to plaintiffs. These consist exclusively of interrogatories and requests for admission, and I send them out to protect the record and not because I expect them to contain any useful information. Half the time I don't get responses. Actually, I don't know how often they respond because when they do respond I seldom look at the responses. Private citizens simply don't have the kind of records that companies do. If Wal-Mart doesn't plow their parking lot and I slip on ice and get hurt I can request copies of relevant policies, the employee schedule for the day, a copy of their plow contract, and all kinds of other stuff. If I slip on some random guy's driveway, what do you think I'm requesting? If there really is some kind of government conspiracy here, do you seriously think that Shauni Kerkhoff has been keeping records of it in her possession for the past 5 years? The most discovery they'll get is the opportunity to depose her, which might not even be their deposition if her attorneys put her up first. They might even have to put her up first to avoid summary judgment. But there will be no lawsuit, because any attorney worth his retainer will have The Blaze on the horn immediately and tell them he has a release ready to go if the price is right. No lawsuit necessary.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
Looping in @netstack, @Quantumfreakonomics, and @greyenlightenment
I discussed this when the case first came out, and while I said at the time that I didn't need to get into the deep dive I did on gait analysis while at the DMV, it's apparent that I now do. First, to reiterate, when they say 94% match or whatever, what they're saying is that they measure certain features of gait like knee flexion angle and come up with a profile. If 6% of the population is expected to have a similar gait profile, then it would be a 94% match because it theoretically excludes 94% of the population. The reason I went through all the categories of description in my previous post was to demonstrate that anything below 90% isn't even really a match, and anything below 99% is of extremely limited utility. Identifying the suspect is a black female is a 94% match right there, because about 12% of the population is black and half of those are female. Given that the comment was well-received without much pushback and awarded an AAQC, I naively thought that I had made my case, evidently I was wrong. So let's get into why that 94% or 98% is bullshit in and of itself:
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Forensic gait analysis relies on the assumption that every person has a unique or nearly unique gait. While this may be true, the extent to which we can determine that it is true is limited by the accuracy with which we can make the relevant measurements. There is currently no evidence to support this assertion.
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In some cases, the level of accuracy is not good to begin with if relying on video. For instance, I read about one angle that we could accurately measure to within five degrees. But the total normal variation was seven degrees.
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Most of the available research into gait was conducted in a clinical setting. Most of what we know about normal gait comes from studies where we were comparing broadly-defined normal gait to abnormal gait, not from studies where we were looking to categorize subtle differences among normal gaits. This second kind of research has been limited.
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There is accordingly no credible database that allows us to assess the frequency of either normal or abnormal gait characteristics.
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In the research that exists (which is again mostly clinical), the subjects are analyzed walking at a designated speed indoors, barefoot, wearing minimal clothing to facilitate measurement, are well lit, and are photographed from fixed angles. In other words, the process is standardized.
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This standardization, however, is limited to the individual experiment. There is no industry-wide standardized methodology for analyzing, comparing, and reporting gait characteristics.
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Gait characteristics are usually dependent, i.e. someone with Characteristic A may be more likely to have Characteristic B. For example, if statistics show that 1 in 17 people have their right knee pointing inwards and 1 in 17 have their right foot pointing inwards, it may be tempting to say that 1 in 238 have both pointing inwards. But in the study I pulled that number from, 1 in 27 had both pointing inwards. Unless we can determine the level of dependence for each gait characteristic, we have to treat any frequency estimates with caution.
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Gait on an individual can change over time based on: Walking speed, evenness of surface, grade, footwear, whether the person is carrying something, whether the person is trying to avoid obstacles (as in a crowd), minor injuries/aches and pains, clothing, how tired the person is, and even whether they're talking on a cell phone.
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The best available method to determine the reliability of gait analysis would be to conduct a study where various practitioners would view video footage similar to what is used in court proceedings. Some clips would be paired with the same individual and others would be paired with different individuals. The results would then be used to calculate false positive and false negative rates. No such study has ever been conducted.
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The only similar study that was ever done asked seven "experienced analysts" to match one individual from five examples. The failure rate was 29%.
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Ideally, sample data should be reviewed by three independent experts. Expert A reviews the reference sample, Expert B reviews the comparison sample, and Expert C performs the comparison. Ideally, the reference sample should be of the suspect walking in a standardized manner.
Take all that into consideration and further consider that we don't even have a reference sample here. We're talking about two different surveillance videos of varying quality, in one of which the suspect is intentionally wearing bulky clothing, is carrying a backpack, and is moseying at varying speed along a vacant sidewalk. In the other, the accused woman is in a police uniform with all the police accessories wearing different footwear and working in a crowded area. The Blaze hasn't posted the video they're using for comparison, only screenshots of it, and those look like they were taken at an entirely different angle than the surveillance video of the suspect. And they also apparently use video of her playing soccer to make the comparison. I checked my copy of the SEAK, Inc. Expert Witness Directory, and it doesn't have a heading for forensic gait analysts. It has a heading for gait, but most of those are the kind of person you hire if your gait has been affected by a car crash or medical malpractice. The few I could find all had backgrounds in podiatry, orthopedics, neurology, or some related medical field. I don't know what background the "veteran analyst" for The Blaze had because they don't tell us who he is. They don't produce an expert report. They don't even have him discuss the analysis other than mentioning that it's "closer to a 98 percent match". It's not clear who this bozo is or what he did.
And if you're still not convinced that all of this is complete bullshit, keep in mind that this story didn't disappear as soon as we turned over to a new Culture War Roundup. It turns out that Ms. Kerkhoff was already the object of far-right MAGA fringe ire, as she fired pepper balls into the crowd on January 6 and testified in related prosecutions, and has the distinction of being the first witness to testify in the first January 6 prosecution. Her name was not selected at random. In fact, someone had already submitted a tip to her employer and she was placed on administrative leave while the FBI investigated. The FBI had, in fact, cleared her, before the story even ran. She was quickly able to produce video of herself playing with her dogs the night the bombs were planted, and that was the end of it as far as the FBI was concerned. Beck himself, who hyped the story in advance as being among the biggest in his lifetime, was walking it back by Monday, refusing to name the woman on his podcast, reminding listeners that a match did not equal guilt, and saying that she was still a private citizen who was innocent until proven guilty. I think it's safe to say that this story is dead.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I hate to break this to you, but when judges order you to pay, they don't give a shit whether you actually have the money or not, and they aren't going to give you guidance on how to get it. You can be flat broke and ordered to pay a million dollars, and the court can do everything from seize bank accounts, foreclose on property, and garnish paychecks until hell freezes over. And government entities don't get some magical exemption from this. But that's all beside the point. He's arguing that he has the right to not spend money appropriated by congress, so maybe use that money? Or maybe just tell the Treasury Department to write a check; he's already got the Supreme Court decision saying he can't be charged with violating any laws that are part of his official duties. However he would have found it, the point is that he didn't spend the money because he didn't want to spend the money. A Democrat would have found a way to get the money. Do you seriously think a Democrat would have made the same excuse?
I suspect this kind of analysis would have predicted 10 of the last 5 Democratic victories.
At what point do I make any predictions? Last year I did and entire post on why I don't make predictions, and why I don't overthink the predictions I do make. That being said, you still have to heed certain warning signs, lest you find yourself whistling past the graveyard, and you still have to capitalize on advantages. I'm not predicting that the Democrats will win in the midterms. I'm saying that Republicans have x, y, and z weaknesses that they need to shore up if they want to have their best chance at winning, and Democrats need to push x,y, and z advantages if they want their best shot at winning. I you don't think that anything I've said is a problem, then fine. I'm some rando on the internet and it's your prerogative to ignore me. But I've made similar criticisms of the Democrats over the past 15 years and was assured by everyone in the bag for them that none of their woke bullshit would ever be a problem.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I just looked up Pennsylvania's laws regarding large roadkill and things are more complicated than most people realize. If the deer appears to be dead you're supposed to call PennDOT (if on a state road) or the Game Commission (if on a local road) to remove the animal. If it's alive and hasn't moved from the road or poses a safety risk you're supposed to call the local police, who may in turn have the game commission dispatch it. If it's dead you can take it, but you have to report it to the Game Commission within 24 to get a permit number for it. I'm guessing that this is so people who get reported for having a deer without tags won't get busted for poaching.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
The most antiwar president imaginable has no control over whether other countries decide to start wars.
A few quick hits about the current political situation:
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The Republicans have now officially become the party of low-propensity voters. Trump was successful because he was able to tap into a certain demographic that was previously resistant to participating in elections, but to appeal to them he had to sacrifice a significant number of reliable participants. I'm not talking about the mythical never-Trump Republicans, but suburban moderates, swing voters, and independents. I've pointed this out before, but Mt. Lebanon, a wealthy Pittsburgh suburb, used to be reliably Republican area and, while it had been shifting leftward for several years prior, the emergence of Trump turned it into the kind of place with rainbow flags and "In this house we believe" signs. Directly south of there, Upper St. Clair is one of the preeminent "new money" suburbs and was even more reliably Republican until recently, but now is more like 50/50. South of there, Peters Township is wealthy and still reliably Republican, but by that point you're outside of Allegheny County and on the edge of what can plausibly be described as suburban. Exchanging wealthy, reliable voters for poor, unreliable ones may have been a winning strategy for Trump to eke out narrow victories in presidential elections, but the results have been disappointing without Trump on the ballot, and it's unclear how much of a hit the GOP will take in a presidential election without him.
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The Democrats' much-maligned caving on the shutdown doesn't look as bad in retrospect. With real pain on the horizon, allowing it to continue indefinitely was a risky prospect, and getting a vote on ACA subsidies was a bigger win than most commentators gave it credit for. Throughout most of the shutdown, the subsidy issue was more of a theoretical problem, with open enrollment only beginning on November 1. When the issue comes to a vote, Open enrollment will have been in full swing for over a month, and cost will be a real issue for a lot of people. Trump has signaled he'd be willing to support some kind of extension, but Republicans in Congress can't really support it. They made their intransigence the central issue of the shutdown, and by voting for it they'd be admitting that they shut down the government for petty reasons. Furthermore, they were trying to scuttle Obamacare from Day One, and now they'e being asked to save it. It's a damned-if-you do situation.
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Affordability is still the biggest issue. For any politician, it's a knotty problem, because there's not much that can be done to effectively combat high prices. For Trump it's worse, however, because he took active steps to make the problem worse. The tariffs are the most obvious example, but the ACA subsidies come into play here as well. This is a gift for Democrats, because it not only gives them an issue to run on, but a concrete policy plan; vowing to eliminate the tariffs is something they can actually do that will have some positive effect.
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One of the biggest problems I see with Democratic politicians, at least locally, is the complete lack of any ground game. They tend to do well in elections that are actually competitive, but when it comes to reliable Republican seats, the candidates are often whoever is willing to run, and they aren't given much in the way of support from the party. They're basically sacrificial lambs. It's understandable that the party doesn't want to waste resources on races they're sure to lose, but complete abandonment makes it much more difficult to capitalize on potential shifts in opinion, as does allowing unserious candidates to run. I'm talking about people who file the paperwork but don't do anything to promote themselves. No knocking on doors, no appearances at community events, limited presence. They win the people who vote straight Democrat but can't make any inroads with anyone else. This is stuff that is more about commitment of time than of money, and while it's unlikely to be enough to win any given election, it may make enough of a dent to set the table for the future.
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Behn's nomination is a textbook example of this. There were better candidates in the primary, but the district was seen as a lost cause and they didn't get any party support. The DSA progressive types seized on Behn being one of their own and poured money into her campaign, allowing her to win the nomination with 27% of the vote. The other candidates split with about 24% each. I'm not one to think that money decides elections, but when they're that close and when the difference in resources is that large, I'm inclined to believe that kicking in some support may have been enough to take one of the others over the top. This isn't to say that they would have won in the general, but with someone that far to the left closing that much of a gap, it isn't beyond the realm of possibility to think that it could have been a lot closer than it was.
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Trump's habit of doubling down on unpopular policies following losses beyond his control comes across as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. After a court ruled that SNAP benefits could be withheld, he not only appealed the decision, but said he wanted the states who had paid benefits to return the money. I have no doubt that if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, he's reinstate them with some other justification. He could use these as offramps that avoid the embarrassment of having to retract them himself, and take the issues off the table for the next election. Instead he decides to keep them alive while providing even more ammunition for his opponents.
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Incompetence is another angle of attack that the Democrats haven't been taking full advantage of. They want to focus on the vindictive nature of the revenge prosecutions, but Trump can easily counter that by pointing out how he was prosecuted himself for spurious reasons. While those prosecutions certainly had their share of incompetence, one resulted in an almost ruinous damage award and one resulted in a felony conviction. Trump doesn't have any clear wins on this front and a lot of embarrassing losses. I wrote about this last week, but again, he keeps doubling down on this. After the court ruled that Lindsey Halligan's appointment was illegal, the Justice Department told the Eastern District of Virginia that they were to continue signing her name on pleadings. The upshot is that there could be legitimate prosecutions that will now be jeopardized because Trump wanted to make a point.
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I don't see Ukraine or Gaza playing much of a role in the election. These aren't wars with direct US involvement, and there are intra-party differences of opinion. For Trump to move the needle on Ukraine he would have to negotiate a deal that was extremely favorable to the Ukrainians, and I doubt that will be forthcoming. Ukraine isn't winning the war, though they may be able to hold out for quite a while. The most likely outcome, aside from a continued stalemate, is some kind of Russian victory, and that doesn't really help anyone. Gaza is technically a settled issue at this point even if the war is realistically continuing, and I don't see it being an issue next year absent major new developments.
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Trump calling for Congressmen to be executed for sedition and the various other outrages we talk about a lot here aren't going to play a major role in the elections. These are the kinds of things people get fired up about for a couple weeks and then forget about.
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Epstein is an interesting one. I don't see there being anything in the files that will hurt Trump that much, but his reluctance to release the files suggests that he may drag this out as an issue. I suspect that a significant amount of information is going to be withheld due to the ongoing investigation or national security exceptions, and this will keep things in the news. I'm on record as saying that this is one of the stupider scandals of our time, but it seems to have real traction and Trump seems committed to making sure it doesn't go away.
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The MTG resignation announcement and hints of other GOP House members considering resigning points to a larger problem with the Republican party than is being talked about. The one thing about the Tweet that struck me was "They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies". Massie and other GOP members have gone on the record about how they are treated like garbage and expected to be nothing more than rubber stamps for Trump, but that quote seems to hint at a deeper problem, where they aren't only expected to do Trump's bidding but to give him credit for their own accomplishments. The current wave of retirements leading to open seats isn't good for them, but what may be worse is if this level of party control carries over into the campaigns themselves. Having to run in spite of an incumbent's unpopular policies isn't ideal but it's doable; just accentuate the positive and run on your own record on issues that are winners and are important to the district. But what if they're expected to run on the issues that Trump thinks is important? What if they have to talk about how great tariffs are, and how their purpose in congress is to push through the Trump agenda? It's been no secret that Trump doesn't give a shit about the party as a whole or what happens after he leaves office, only the glorification of his own massive ego. If Trump tries to direct House campaigns to fit with this mold, it could be a recipe for disaster.
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If there's any kind of military action in Venezuela it's over for Trump. I don't think this will happen, but it's pretty clear that Rubio wants it to happen, and a couple targeted airstrikes won't be enough to remove Maduro from power. A sustained military operation would require additional appropriation from congress, and the last time a president was able to get that was in 2003, when 9/11 was still fresh in everyone's memory. Again, it's a damned-if-you do situation for Republicans, because support for such a war is tepid at best, even among Republicans, but Trump would expect his rubber stamp, especially if there are already troops on the ground. Ending the war would just be another no-brainer issue for democrats to run on.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
By that logic, Biden should be the real anti-war president. He didn't bomb anyone we weren't already bombing, got us out of a war, and wasn't making threats against Greenland, Venezuela, and Canada.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Even as a joke, it wore thin pretty quickly. Irony isn't an excuse unless it's worthwhile.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
In 2006 there were 140,000 US troops in Iraq. By contrast, when the Afghanistan drawdown began there were 5,000 troops stationed there, and there were never many more than 100,000 throughout the war. I picked 2006 because it was a typical mid-war year that wasn't part of a surge or a drawdown. That year we spent $70 billion on the war and suffered 821 killed and over 6400 wounded. You can also add on the 32 billion in Iraqi government spending that they paid for themselves out of oil revenue. Which revenue, by the way, wasn't anywhere near what they needed it to be, since the war was disrupting the supply. With that kind of production, the price of oil would have to be about $140/bbl just for them to pay for security and government funding i.e. it has to be that much just to get to what would be a price of $0 in any other context. Then add all the normal expenses on top of that and you're looking at prices that have never existed just to hit breakeven and not make any money.
And even if it were profitable, profitable for whom? Do you think the US government was going to operate these fields at taxpayer expense and give everyone free gas? No, it was going to give concessions to private companies and charge a royalty, the same as it does on public lands in the US. This was traditionally 12.5%, even as rates crept upward during the fracking boom, and have only gotten up to 16.67% with the Inflation Reduction Act. I spent a decade in the industry and the largest royalty I ever saw on a lease was 20% in the Utica. At any rate, the Iraqi government made about 90 billion in oil revenue last year, but there's no war going on, and the 2006 numbers suggest we can comfortably halve that. So about 45 billion in additional government revenue, against about 100 billion in expenditures. I don't see how this is better than what we got.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Except then you're basically committing to a permanent military presence wherever oil is produced, which is throughout the country. You may be okay with that, but selling the war as an effective permanent takeover was never going to be politically tenable. We would have had to commit to nation building as a side effect.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
It's only a niche talent in the sense that top professionals are skiing on water injected courses that are more bulletproof than anything mother nature will give you outside of an ice storm, but what Westerners consider bulletproof is far from it. Skiing deep powder is the real niche skill, and it's a lot easier to go from ice to powder than vice versa. But breakable crust... Fuck that shit.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Like I said, he won't ski in the East, and I can't tolerate him long enough to go out West with him. And no, he's not joking.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
If it wasn't clear I've never actually skied with the guy so I have no idea.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Which parts? It isn't that big, and the only parts of it that I would consider remotely bad are the parts of the island where it's all drug addicts. But he isn't likely to live on the island if he doesn't want to have a car. Parts of it are dumpy for sure, but most of it is completely safe, and it isn't really blighted. If he's looking for actual hellscapes that aren't inside big cities, parts of the Mon Valley are much worse.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
How about e) more about the fact that I find it pleasurable regardless of any of the other factors you mentioned? a is only relevant if you're doing it competitively, and most people aren't. I'm beter at skiing than any of my other hobbies, and I've never raced in my life beyond the extremely casual "race you to the bottom" on an easy run with your friends. b is completely irrelevant, because it only gives you social status with a select few people. The fact that I'm incredibly good at skiing means absolutely zero to people who don't ski because they'll never see me ski, and if they somehow did then the fact that I can go down a moderately difficult run would be as impressive to them as skiing Corbet's Couloir. The only social advantage to being good is that if you want to do it regularly, the kind of person who goes regularly is probably pretty good, and you'll have more fun if you can keep up, but this is still a pretty low bar that anyone can attain with enough practice. c is relevant to an extent, but there are some things I'm never going to be able to do and I'm cool with that. I mountain bike a lot and I can't jump to save my life, despite it being a fairly common skill, and an essential one for riding some lines, but I don't see a future where I'll be able to do it well and I have enough fun not doing it that I don't care if I can. Maybe I'll learn someday but maybe I won't. d can be fun, but I wouldn't consider it essential, and I greatly prefer a world where that's more of a possibility rather than something I have to rely on. I'd prefer easy, reliable access to every trip being a time-consuming slog that had good potential of being a total bust. There may be fewer first ascents or new routes, but for all the people who discovered them there was a lot of trial and error. Driving two hours, getting fully unloaded and set up, only to get a quarter of the way up and realize that the route isn't doable may be a fun adventure if you're doing it every once in a while, but I wouldn't want that to be the outcome of a significant number of trips I took.
If your goal is to actually be good at something relative to the current number of participants, there are plenty of unpopular activities that you can participate in where few enough people participate that you'll have a legitimate shot at being among the best with enough persistence. I'm not talking about obscure shit that nobody has heard of, either, but things that were popular enough at one time to have developed a mature ecosystem but that have faded from popularity. For instance, chess has been continuously popular for centuries, people teach it to kids at an early age, and people competing at the grandmaster level have skills that you never will. But bridge is significantly more difficult. Chess players don't believe me, but you can teach anyone to play chess poorly in under an hour; you need to take lessons and develop your game for months before you'll be able to play bridge with the same level of facility. Even computers can only play at a rudimentary level. Yet in the 1940s and 1950s it was America's most popular card game. A survey from the card manufacturers' trade association done in the 40s showed that 30% of men and nearly half of women played it. In the early 60s there was even a weekly half-hour television show where top players (often business leaders and distinguished politicians) would play each other with strategic analysis provided for the home player. Now, the number of people who know anything about it at all is much lower, and they're all dying off, but it has enough staying power that there are bridge clubs in most cities, international tournaments, daily newspaper columns, and the like. You'll probably never be able to defeat the top players in the game, but being the best bridge player in your town is a distinct possibility.
You may argue that since there's no longer any social status to being good at bridge that doesn't matter, but that's my point; there was no social status associated with being good at cycling, or rock climbing, or whatever, in the 1950s. These things come up periodically. In the 1970s backgammon was popular. In the 1980s there were racquetball places everywhere. Prior to the pandemic it was axe throwing and escape rooms. Since 2020 pickleball seems to be the current thing, though it doesn't require much skill so maybe it has more staying power. Disc golf is difficult enough that people will be mildly impressed if you're good at it but easy enough that you can actually be good at it with enough practice (unlike regular golf, which is impossible for most people). I'm sure there are still Parkour people out there.
But there's a friend of mine who is a much better mountain biker than I will ever be, and he's one of those people who can just pick up new skills easily despite the learning curve. We have another friend who is pretty good at a lot of things as well, but he's completely insufferable about it. He insists he's one of the top C1 canoeists on the East Coast. When we ride mountain bikes with some of his friends, he tells us that we'll be riding with some of the best in Pennsylvania. He refuses to ski at our local mountain because it isn't challenging enough, and unironically claims that whenever he skis in the East he's invariably the best person at the resort. I say "unironically" because this is a common joke on /r/skiing, i.e. people complaining about other skiers while insisting that they're the best person on the mountain. I found out about this on a ski trip with our friends that he couldn't attend, and I insisted that I was better than he was (which I genuinely believed) if only because I ski regularly and he hadn't in years. This led to my friends joking that I must be one of the top 3 skiers on the East Coast (which I am most assuredly not). As to my first friend, he told me once that if you're going to say that you're better than any other dedicated amateur (except maybe a total beginner), that you'd better be doing it for a living. And I'm inclined to agree with him.
The upshot of all of this is that the opportunities are much, much greater now than they were in 1959. I said in another post that if you were into the outdoors back then, hunting and fishing were pretty much it. Anything else was a niche activity that was expensive and difficult to learn. These things became more easily accessible beginning in the 1970s and have increased in popularity since then. Yes, it may have been easier to be among the best back when few people did the activity in question, but you wouldn't have had the conceptual knowledge to even think of doing it. There's probably something that exists now that will become popular in a decade that you can get on the bleeding edge of, but you won't, because unless you're in some niche group where you find out about it, or invent it yourself, you're not even going to think of doing it.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
That's basically the same argument that a certain type of degrowth leftist makes. If relative wealth is all that matters, then economic development in and of itself doesn't make sense because it just increases the treadmill. The only way to improve society as a whole is through fundamentals, which would include redistributing wealth to blunt the pain of being at the low end of the economic totem pole.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It probably wouldn't have even been that, though. French food didn't become popular in the United States until Julia Child made it so, and even then a lot of her recipes are modified based on what was available to the typical American (good luck finding pancetta in 1962). If you want an idea of what fine dining looked like during the postwar era, here's a menu from The Brown Derby in Los Angeles from 1948. You can see that it's mostly basic meat and seafood dishes. Few Americans in 2025 would be willing to pay the equivalent of $30 for what amounts to a country-fried chicken breast with gravy and consider it fine dining.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
By that logic, being the chieftain of a hunter-gatherer tribe, or an ancient Assyrian king, would be preferable to living in the modern age; in other words, any era has technological improvements that seem impressive at the time. If people in 2125 have it better than we do now, then it's preferable to live in the future. But we don't know what things will be like then. We do know what things were like in the 1950s, and just because they seemed amazing at the time, they were objectively worse on almost every metric. In 1900 it would have been a big deal to have electricity, the telephone, and the phonograph record. In 1850 it would have been a big deal to have access to cheap textiles and mass-produced farming implements. But go back to then and you get a worse standard of living than people in the poorest parts of the world have today. If you think that the standard of living for a rich man is preferably, that can be achieved for a relatively modest sum of money in today's terms.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
In the 1950s most people were making coffee with percolators, and there was no market for high-end coffee beans. Pourover Folgers is still Folgers.
Camping gear, miuntain bikes, etc, might not be as light or as good as today, but many natural areas were potentially much better in the 50s.
Mountain biking didn't start until the 1970s, and that was people racing old beach cruisers they called "clunkers" down fire roads in Marin County. There weren't any purpose-built mountain bikes until the 1980s, and these were rigid. You wouldn't get any kind of suspension until the very end of the decade, and it wasn't common until the 1990s.
Natural areas were decidedly not better in the 1950s. Especially in the East, most of what is now forest had been clear-cut prior to 1930 and there was still a lot of farmland. There was more forested area in the 1950s, but a lot of this was still in early successional stages. There was also a lot of unremediated contamination from mining and other activities. There were 44 state parks in Pennsylvania in 1956, compared to 124 today. I collect old outdoor books, and the equipment available was of a decidedly rudimentary nature. Pretty much everything aside from hunting and fishing was a specialized activity that wouldn't gain much traction until the 1970s. Whitewater, for instance, didn't really exist outside the Grand Canyon until 1964. Most first descents of whitewater streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were done in the late 1960s (I know some of the participants personally, although they all insist that these weren't first descents but very early descents). Back then, they found where to paddle based on looking at USGS topo maps for steams with sufficient gradient and didn't know what to expect when they got there; som traveled long distances to find streams that were unrunnable. Now anyone can go on American Whitewater and find stream information, including runnable levels.
The point of all of this is that even if some of this stuff was theoretically possible, the conceptual knowledge that allows us to enjoy it now simply didn't exist back then.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
To be clear, that wasn't an executive order. The administration announced that DOE would be pausing issuance of new permits while they reviewed the process, but there wasn't anything official that was signed by the president, unless you include an official announcement on the White House website. I have no idea whether this is something that DOE would have had to consult with the president about before doing, or how much involvement Biden had, or whether it's something his communications team decided the administration would take credit for.
I'd also mention that there's a fundamental disconnect between what oil companies want and what consumers want, and the GOP seems to regularly conflate these interests. I spent a decade in the oil and gas industry, and we are happier the higher prices are. This isn't any different from most industries. But there's political pressure to keep prices as low as possible. The policy would have the natural consequence of putting downward pressure on natural gas prices by limiting the industry's ability to export. This may have been bad for the industry but good for consumers. If increased feasibility of exports were to cause prices to quadruple, I don't think most Americans would be saying "Thank God that the oil and gas industry is doing well!"; no, they'd be bitching about high costs, as they should be. I don't even think most Americans would agree that gas prices should have some kind of floor to ensure that the industry maintains a minimum degree of profitability. I don't know whether the policy in question was any good on a fundamental level, but you can sell it either way.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Let me try to restate my argument, because I think we're talking past each other. What kind of test are you going to have and what is it going to entail? What I'm getting at is: What percentage of 11-year-olds crossing over is it going to exclude? 80%? 90% 50%? It honestly doesn't matter what number you pick, because unless you're only selecting for the top 1% you're using a test that any 14-year-old is going to be able to pass easily unless he's fat, special needs, etc. IF you're talking about a troop, where you do the full complement of scout activities and advance towards Eagle, you need a steady pipeline from Cubs, or the troop withers and dies. I've seen power struggles before where the Cubmaster loses faith in the local troop and sends the kids elsewhere, and it takes a long time for the troop to recover, if it can at all. So any troop that decides to exclude is at a disadvantage initially, even if their reputation enables them to draw from a wider geographic area.
But all you've really done is exclude for an 11-year-old with the fitness of a below average 14-year-old. And any 14-year-old who is that out of shape doesn't want to do the more difficult activities anyway. The goal of Venturing is to move away from advancement and focus on high-adventure group activities. Selecting for motivated 14-year-olds does a better job than selecting for fit 11-year-olds, and since advancement is an afterthought the group can focus on activities. I haven't seen any Venture crews who participated in my programs that included people who shouldn't have been there. I saw more 14-year-olds who could pass a fitness test but were some combination of lazy, unskilled, or petulant, while these kids never seemed to show up in Venturing. In any organization that relies on people acting locally (rather than the council-level program), some groups are going to be more active than others. I don't think creating a new kind of class is going to do anything, and in the years I spent heavily involved in Scouting and Venturing, nothing led me to believe that something like this would have any benefit.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
What you're talking about already exists. They're just called Venture Crews, and they don't have any fitness tests and are variable in how active they are. Realistically, 11 is too young for them to make that kind of choice. Even if the kid can pass some kind of test, they aren't going to keep up. My program was geared toward Venture crews and older scouts and while there were a few 12 and 13 year olds who slipped through for various reasons and invariably did fine, there's generally a pretty clear skill progression with age, and when I worked with younger kids on the side there's no way I'd want them anywhere near my program as a matter of course. If you were to try to separate these kids out right after crossing over all but a few would go to normal troops and the pipeline would dry up pretty quickly because no one wants to join a troop without their friends. Aside from the fitness test, nothing is preventing anyone from starting a troop like this as it is, but saying you want to be more active runs up against the reality that it requires active adult leaders and kids who are also willing to put in the work as far as planning is concerned. Last year I had to tag along with my old troop because a few kids wanted to get the cycling merit badge and needed a second adult to go on the 50-miler. The first adult was a 22-year-old who hung around after aging out. I hadn't been involved with the troop in 20 years. None of the dads were willing to ride 50 miles, even if the scouts were. And by the end of the ride, the kids, who were all fit and reasonably active, looked like they never wanted to sit on a bike again. I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I'm an Eagle Scout, I worked for the Boy Scouts for a period of time as High Adventure Director for my local council, and I've regularly volunteered since at the council level, though my involvement over the past decade has waned and been more at the direction of others rather than of my own initiative, though I did agree to attend a meeting this Saturday evening to discuss certain things. Complaining about a program compared to what it used to be is only valid if you actually knew what it used to be like. So when you say something like:
It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.
For full disclosure I was a Cub Scout and Den Chief as a kid but other than that I had little involvement with Cub Scouts. As a professional, I helped out with program during special winter weekends we hosted but I never did anything beyond that, and I never served on the Cub Committee as a volunteer. But I had a lot of colleagues and friends who were involved heavily in the Cub program, some of whom continue to be involved to this day. This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.
Cub Scouts was deliberately separate from Boy Scouts, intended to be a more family-oriented program. Your parent signs off on the requirements, not someone with the Troop/Pack. The program was thus designed around things you could do at home with your family. Except different families do things differently. Some families just aren't going to go camping, or hiking, or whatever, and while there was always that opportunity at the Den or Pack level, they weren't going to make it part of the requirements. Cub Scout leadership is also more transitory than in Boy Scouts. Parents usually only participate while their kids are there, then cross over to Boy Scouts with them. It's not like with Boy Scouts where you have old Scoutmasters who can't give it up and college kids who hang around as adult leaders. Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.
The reason for the changes was similar to the reason for the admission of girls, and the same reason that underlies the lion's share of decisions the BSA has made over the past 15 years: Numbers. The problem we had was that there was a lot of interest in the Cub program but crossover rates were in sharp decline. The idea was that if we modeled the Cub requirements as junior versions of the Boy Scout requirements it could ease with the transition. Girls were admitted because, when you're looking to increase numbers, it doesn't help to exclude 50% of the youth population. Even in my program things were liberalized a lot more than I would have expected. National Standards had a list of activities that were prohibited in all circumstances. Some of them were inherently dangerous (exploring abandoned mines) and would never be approved under any circumstances, but others were normal recreational activities that the conservative brass in Iriving thought weren't in the Scout Spirit. Then they not only removed ATV riding from the prohibited list but made it part of the camp program. I don't think I'm terribly conservative when it comes to this, but this kind of thing irritates me more than anything they do with politics. I'd rather see it it turned into a woke DEI paradise than have it degenerate into a third-rate tourist trap where our camp offers paddle boats and miniature golf. Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Great question. I think the main source of your misunderstanding is that your conception of the kind of grants involved are different from those that are at issue here. Most people's idea of a grant is some fixed sum of money that's available for a specific purpose that the government awards to a specific group, and that's true of a lot of grants relating to things like the arts, scientific research, local government, etc. These each have their own criteria that vary, and I'm not going to get into that here because it's not really the point. The grants at issue here aren't for specific sums of money but are reimbursement for services that the government is paying for. Think of something like Medicaid—a qualifying individual who seeks medical treatment will have the cost of qualifying care covered by the program. It doesn't really work, though, if you just ask doctors to apply for $500,000 grants that they can use to provide free care. There are a lot of people who are going to need a lot of services and we can't really identify the particular amount each person is going to need from a particular provider, and we want as many providers as possible to participate in the system so that there won't be as much friction.
So the way it works is that every provider who wants to participate gets qualified and once the permission is granted they submit bills from qualifying patients to Medicaid for reimbursement, which they're paid based on a fixed schedule. To be clear, not all providers participate, but most do, and when you're aiming for coverage to be as wide as possible you make it so any provider who meets the criteria is eligible. What you can't do then, legally, is deny the ability for a provider who meets the criteria to participate based on you're own prejudices. You need a concrete reason.
Feed Our Future was a group that was purportedly providing a similar service, which would provide meals to children who qualified. Since they couldn't say in advance how many kids would show up each day, they would keep records and submit them for reimbursement. So say if one location served 100 meals per day on average, and the government reimbursed at $10/meal, they'd send a bill at the end of the month for $30,000. The state had denied them grant money for years based on their perception that they were shady, which was probably based on legitimate reasons. The problem was that in 2020 they were applying to participate in a COVID-era Federal program that was being administered by the state, and the Feds set the eligibility requirements. So while they may not have met the requirements the state had set in the past, the state couldn't use that as a justification to deny them Federal money distributed under a different program. So it was ultimately the Federal government who prosecuted them, not the state, as they had stolen Federal money.
It sounds like he split the purchase, putting part of it on cash and part of it on a card. When I was a cashier in high school people would occasionally do this, though these days I don't know the motivation (back then it was people using food stamps and paying the balance in cash or using cash they had and charging the rest before charging was a thing rich people did to rack up points).
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