Rov_Scam
12d ago
Yeah, we could do that. But when your 13-year-old gets caught stealing a dirty magazine from a convenience store, don't come crying to the court.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
What you're essentially advocating for is the abolition of the 6th Amendment, which gives the right to confront one's accusers. Even if we eliminated this requirement, though, it still doesn't solve the problem, as the witness still needs to be present, it's just the judge doing the questioning and not the lawyers. As for your specific evidentiary examples, the video is actually the least persuasive piece of evidence in the scenario, since it probably doesn't show enough to convict. I grabbed the first shoplifting video I could find from YouTube; it's a news report about a theft from a liquor store in Kenya. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ErfIL-_UOiA This is actually a better video than I originally pictured — it's in color, has reasonably high resolution, and appears to show most of the store. Now tell me, without looking at the transcript, what items are being stolen and how much do they cost? Would you be confident in being able to identify someone you had never seen before as the person in this video? Would you be okay with someone you've never met before identifying you in this video? Now imagine that the only video we have just shows you removing an item from a shelf, and all you can see is the aisle that you're in. It's good evidence in that it buttresses other testimony, but it's pretty useless on its own.
or even just by the police finding a shoplifted item on the person of a shoplifter.
This is even worse evidence. A police finds an item on you. What basis does he have to determine that it was stolen? How would you feel about the following scenario: A shopkeeper reports that he observed a white male stealing a pair of expensive headphones from an electronics store. The police see you a block away listening to a pair of headphones that match the shopkeeper's description. The shopkeeper does not identify you in court, but you are nonetheless convicted on the cop's testimony that you had the shoplifted merchandise in your possession?
Rov_Scam
12d ago
They are, but if the complaining witness isn't motivated enough to show up for 15 minutes of questioning, then the prosecutor isn't going to waste their time with the case either.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I work with a few former prosecutors, and this topic has come up a number of times. It's easy to look at the number of dismissals and non-prosecutions of shoplifting and conclude that the prosecutors are being wishy-washy, but the realities of the situation often leave them with no real alternative. Consider the following case: A store clerk observes a thief stealing an item and calls the police. The suspect is arrested, and a body search uncovers the item. There is video of the suspect stealing the item. This is the perfect case, a slam-dunk to convict right?
In theory, yes; the evidence is incontrovertible. But think about what's actually required for a conviction:
- The clerk needs to testify that she saw the subject steal the item
- Someone familiar with the CCTV system needs to authenticate the video
- The cop needs to testify that the item was in the suspect's possession
The only witness who has a reasonable chance of actually testifying at trial is the cop, but unless he also happened to be there when the item was stolen, his testimony is useless on its own. A clerk making ten bucks an hour is unlikely to spend her day off testifying in court, and her employer is unlikely to pay her to not work. And unless the clerk is also the manager or has some familiarity with the CCTV system, they're going to need a manager to testify if they want to use the video, and good luck with a manager taking the day off to testify. With small convenience stores, there may be one guy running the whole place who would have to close for the day if he were required to be in court. The prosecutor's best bet in these cases is to confront the defendant with the evidence, offer a deal, and if they take it they take it and if they don't, drop the charges. Of course, defense attorneys know this as well, and they know why prosecutors do this, so they can be fairly confident that even if the charges aren't dropped that their client won't be convicted anyway, and the prosecutors aren't stupid so they can just skip the first step and dismiss the case before they waste any time on it, unless the victim is adamant about prosecution. Some are, but when a store proprietor finds out how much it's going to cost him to prosecute over a few hundred dollars in merchandise he usually decides it isn't worth it. Keep in mind that in most of these cases the merchandise is actually recovered, so there isn't even much of a tangible loss. Paying two employees a day's wages to testify is an expensive way of proving an abstract point.
Now combine this with the fact that DA's offices are chronically short-staffed and have high turnover rates. Some people love it, but most people burn out pretty quickly. You make less money for more work. They don't exactly have the manpower to take on every single theft case that gets reported. It's similar to the solution you give of building more prisons — it's easy to say "hire more DAs", it's quite another to actually be willing to pay for it. We're dealing with this situation right now in Allegheny County. County Executive Sara Innamorato is the exact kind of single, progressive, tattooed, DSA-supporting lefty that J.D. Vance hates. The county is currently facing a budget crisis, and she wants to increase property taxes to cover the deficit and give a small bump to the DA's office budget. County Council has describes her plan (which would increase property taxes by $182 for the average homeowner) as dead on arrival, and she's basically thrown down the gauntlet and told them that if they had any better ideas she'd consider them.
If tax increases are a nonstarter in a place that elected Innamorato as executive, they aren't going to play much better elsewhere. Demanding increased funding for police and prosecutors sounds good, but the people making these arguments out of one side of their mouth are bitching about taxes being to high out of the other side. It's basically like the school board meeting from The Simpsons. Where is this money supposed to come from, exactly? take it out of the highway budget? EMS? The board of elections? Parks and recreation? It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
So there is hope for Freddie Got Fingered? Some thing are bad and irredeemable. Or relegated to cult status. Has there been a piece that was poorly received and then gained widespread popularity?
No. The first thing you should be aware of is that the number of subscribers to Advanced Genius Theory is very small. The second thing is that it puts faith in the artist based on a prior evaluation of genius. For example, with a guy like Coltrane, he's already established himself as a genius, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Tom Green was never considered a genius by anyone. Finally, one of the requirements for a work to be Advanced is that it has to be presented without irony. Tom Green accepted the Razzie for Freddy Got fingered in person, which is not behavior that suggests he thought of the film as a serious piece of art that was deserving of respect.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
A Hail Mary isn't a typical pass play where the QB is trying to hit an open receiver. The idea is to bunch your receivers at the goal line and hope to create enough chaos for one of them to come down with the ball. The reason they don't rush 5, or even 4, for that matter, is that the play takes so long to develop that they should be able to get adequate pressure with 3. You need to post 3 DBs deep to defend the goal line, plus 4 CBs to jam the receivers at the line and provide trail coverage, plus a linebacker to spy or guard against the hook & ladder. Give up any one of these spots and you're creating a higher percentage play than if you make the WB throw the Hail Mary.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Joe Flacco left the Ravens after 11 seasons, traded because a rookie named Lamar Jackson upstaged him while he was injured. He started another year and became a backup after failing a physical and having surgery at age 35. the Bucs dumped Jameis Winston at age 25 in favor of a 43-year-old Tom Brady, because the former threw too many picks. Winston would never be a regular starter again. People forget that the guy's only 30, because he feels like a has been. Flacco was able to give adequate QB play because being adequate is what he did all his life. Winston is athletic but turnover-prone. He's also similar stylistically to Watson, and a big part of the problem is that Cleveland runs more of a Joe Flacco type offense than a DeShaun Watson type offense. Watson's best years were running a spread offense where he threw a lot and was able to scramble if necessary. Cleveland runs heavy sets and wants to run the ball a lot. I don't know why they thought he'd be a good fit.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Winston will go nowhere with the Browns because they're benefiting from what I call the New QB Effect. Every year, at least one quarterback who had been previously written off as a backup will play in a game or two where he puts up good numbers and surprises everyone. Then he eventually comes back down to earth and people remember why this guy isn't starting. The reason for this is simple: Any QB worth his salt will do well if the opponent doesn't have any tape on him. Once the guy plays a few games, opponents can figure out his tendencies and prepare for them. This is exactly what happened to Mike White with the Jets 2 years ago and to Mason Rudolph with the Steelers last year. It's why the first few weeks of the season are a crapshoot (since the preseason is all backups and coaches don't want to give away their gameplans it's pretty much useless as a study aid). So while I'm glad to see the nonthreatening Browns deliver Ravens loss that helps the Steelers in the standings, I'm not too worried that the Browns will be good enough to beat us when we play them. We'll have three weeks of tape by then, which is coincidentally around the amount it takes to figure a guy out.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
There's an idea in cultural criticism called Advanced Genius theory. The basic gist of it is that, when and iconic artist (usually a musician) puts out a work that everybody—critics, the public, etc.—agrees is terrible, it's probably not terrible in any metaphysical sense, it's just that the artist's genius has advanced beyond our ability to understand it. This is a fringe idea to be sure, as I am unaware of any critics who actually subscribe to it. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield has said that it's merely an excuse for people to "listen to shitty music by artists they consider to be non-shitty".
1959 was arguably the most important year in American musical history. Jazz, up to this point, was largely based on concepts of functional harmony that were prevalent in American musical theater. Musicians had been gradually increasing the harmonic complexity throughout the music's history, a trend that accelerated following WWII. John Coltrane's album Giant Steps upped the ante considerably by creating an entirely new theoretical framework of constant structure major 7 harmony cycled across major thirds in consecutive multi-tonic systems, aka The Coltrane Changes. While this sounds perfectly normal to the casual listener, any musician trying to improvise is forced to deal with moves that are otherwise unheard of in any kind of music all while keeping up with the breakneck pace of the chord changes.
At the other end of the spectrum, Miles Davis, never among the best technical players, ditched conventional chord changes entirely in favor of modes, which hadn't been a common feature of Western music since the Renaissance era. Instead of a chord progression, there was merely a tonal center and accompanying scale. Rather than keep up with the acrobatics of a complicated chord progression, soloists could put more thought into what they were doing and stretch out. Kind of Blue has since become the most revered album in jazz history. And then there was Ornette Coleman, for whom modalism wasn't enough. He wanted to ditch harmony entirely in favor of melody, and put out The Shape of Jazz to Come, its title a not-so-subtle harbinger of the future.
John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps as a leader (obviously), and was a sideman on Kind of Blue. He didn't play in Coleman's band but he was in awe of him. To Coltrane, Coleman's ideas represented a sort of platonic ideal. In 1960 he recorded a series of Coleman compositions with members of Coleman's band, and while the results are okay, it's clear that Coltrane had to chart his own path. The 1959 albums would be the cornerstones of modern jazz. Armed with this knowledge, Coltrane would spend the first half of the 1960s plowing further and further into uncharted territory. By the time he toured Japan in the summer of 1966, his band was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth. In 1960 he recorded a version of "My Favorite Things" that recast the song as a 12-minute modal vamp that didn't bother to get to the bridge until the very end. By 1966 he was extending it up to an hour, and it bore so little resemblance to the Julie Andrews version that one wonders why Rodgers and Hammerstein were even getting credit. Everything he recorded after this is almost beyond description, and he would be dead within a year of returning from Japan. He was forty.
A few years back, there was a Netflix documentary about the life and career of John Coltrane. Cornel West appears in the film as an interview subject, and when they get to Coltrane's final recordings he admits that they aren't something he can listen to unless he's in a very specific state of mind. One gets the impression that Dr. West doesn't actually like these recordings, and that he's effectively never in the appropriate state of mind, if such a state even exists. But he doesn't go as far as saying that the recordings are actually bad. I've heard these myself, and while I share West's inability to truly get into them, it's clear that they aren't bad. Coltrane, by this point, is operating on a plane of consciousness so foreign to us mere mortals that we're simply incabable of comprehending it.
John Coltrane is the only musician that approaches the level of Advanced Genius. Advancement theorists like to bring up people like Lou Reed and Neil Young as the quintessential examples of such, but, let's face it, all these guys ever really did was make rock and roll records. Coltrane took the idea of harmony to its logical conclusion and spent the rest of his career destroying it. With each step he took, he blew the minds of those who listened to him, and eventually reached the point where no one could keep up with him. Miles Davis may be personally responsible for multiple revolutions within jazz, but those were genre-transforming. Coltrane is sui generis. Even acolytes like Pharoah Sanders and enthusiasts like Kemasi Washington can only exist as pale imitations.
I doubt Cornel West has ever heard of Advanced Genius Theory or is familiar with its principles, yet he seems to understand the concept more deeply than those who invented it. If you're looking for someone to vote for and can't decide based on their actual political positions, that's as good a reason as any.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
If you're worried about wokeness, you should honestly be voting Democrat. When Trump was elected, the idea of wokeness was relatively new and was foreign to much of the Democratic party. By 2020 it had metastasized to become an overarching narrative, even as the party's nominee tried to distance himself from it. I remember on the old SSC board a number of people said they were voting for Trump in 2016 for similar reasons as you outline above, namely that a Trump victory would smack down this nascent wokism once and for all. Of course, it had quite the opposite effect; wokism was much more pervasive and much more mainstream at the end of Trump's term than it was at the beginning. Most of the perceived excesses of the movement, such that it existed, were more a direct reaction to Trump's election than to any overarching policy goals of the Democratic party.
Hillary Clinton wasn't woke in the slightest; anyone who could be remotely described as such was already in the tank for Sanders. Had Clinton won, it would have been a direct repudiation of the more radical elements of the party, and it would be at least 8 years before the wokes would get another crack at mainstream influence, if they still even existed. Trump's victory, however, allowed them to create a narrative that the party's loss was due to Clinton's intransigence when it came to social issues and more radical leftist policy. If Sanders had been the candidate, he would have trounced Trump and led America into a new era of prosperity. But the Democratic party insisted on running as a continuation of an Obama presidency that leftists had soured on and that conservatives had unfairly demonized. Add in the fact that no one really liked Hilary Clinton and Trump's victory seemed inevitable.
So now there is a large contingent of the left that is now stuck living with a Trump administration that, by the day, seems to be trying to outdo itself with how inept it can be, and with a president who is confirming all the suspicions they've had about the latent racism among a large part of the electorate. The presidency is a lost cause, but there are other routes. The Squad comes to power. The non-governmental institutions controlled by the left take a more active stance in promoting their ideology, or at least putting up guardrails against Trump's policies. By the time the absolute explosion in woke rhetoric happens in the summer of 2020 Trump has been in office for four years. His administration had an entire term to prevent what they saw on the horizon in 2016, and they failed absolutely miserably. The thing that irks me the most about right-wing complaints about wokism is that the most egregious examples of it — COVID policy, defund the police, riots, DEI — all happened under Trump's watch.
And then, as soon as Biden was elected, things started to cool down. Two members of The Squad were voted out of office this spring, and AOC has become a mainstream Pelosi acolyte. DEI people are being laid off. Robin D'Angelo is unemployed. Ibram X. Kendi hasn't published anything in years. Kamala Harris still has some vaguely woikish things in her arsenal, but she's backtracked on most of the woke positions she took in 2019. Republicans are criticizing her for this. Republican complaints about wokism seem anachronistic at this point; the only time most of these policies even come up is when Republican candidates mention them.
If Trump gets elected, what do you think is going to happen, that his opponents will just shut up? No, we're going to left-wing opposition to absolutely every one of his policy proposals, regardless of whether these proposals are actually right-wing or not. The entire Democratic apparatus will shift into a mode of limiting the damage as much as possible, and this will include protests, and resistance to policy changes and all the other bullshit that happened during the first Trump term. And Trump will be about as effective in stopping it as he was in his first term, unless he wants to turn the country into a full-on police state. I'm not saying you shouldn't vote what you feel, but if you seriously think that a Trump presidency will put an end to whatever woke bullshit you're concerned about, I have some swamp land in Jersey that's for sale.
Rov_Scam
18d ago
I don't think it's so much that betting markets are manipulated as it is that they can be representative of the biased of the bettors. I remember mediocre Steelers seasons where the team wasn't playing well, yet they always seemed to be favored by a few points, regardless of the opponent. Why? Because there were certain people who just bet on the Steelers all the time. I don't know who is actually betting on elections but I'd be surprised if any of the following are doing it in significant numbers: Women, minorities, older voters, people without college education, people in rural areas, low-income voters, blue collar voters, etc. Sports betting certainly has its own demographic biases as well, but they track pretty closely to the population that follows sports. The younger, white, male, urban, college-educated population doesn't track well with the segment of the population that follows politics, insofar as the bulk of the people actually participating in the election don't fall into that demographic group. the whole "wisdom of crowds" argument doesn't apply as much.
Rov_Scam
19d ago
Even as a Steelers fan, I was rooting for the Bengals in that season because that fanbase had put up with so much nonsense over the years, and they finally had a team that could be taken seriously. Even the Marvin Lewis "not your grandfather's Bungles" teams always looked like they were overachievers who would blow it as soon as the playoffs rolled around. Then Joe Burrow showed up at the Super Bowl in that horrible tiger striped suit and I decided to root for the Rams. After all, Aaron Donald is further proof that no matter how mediocre Pitt's football team may have been over the past 40 years, they can still crank out NFL hall of famers like nobody's business.
Rov_Scam
19d ago
So, in other words, if Trump wins by a wide margin, and Kamala Harris says that her own internal polling shows her winning by a landslide in all 50 states, this should be enough to conduct whatever and as many investigations as she wants, and that we should delay certification until all of them are complete and/or she should refuse to conduct the electoral vote count until she's satisfied?
Rov_Scam
20d ago
A big problem here is there simply wasn’t enough time to actually conduct a serious investigation. In order to actually investigate the election fraud claim that voting machines changed votes, you’d have to forensically audit dozens of machines in every state. To do so properly would take several weeks. The people claiming no fraud were saying so within days.
The same can be said for the people alleging fraud. Absent some specific evidence, of which none was provided, there was no basis for which Trump to even suggest that the election was fraudulent. Yet he was making these allegations before they had even finished counting the votes. This throws the whole call for forensic audits of voting machines into question as well. There was concerted effort to "audit" the election results in several states, but the auditors never explained exactly what they were looking for, or what they were doing, or how they expected what they were doing to demonstrate what they were looking for. Instead, they poked around with constantly changing procedures before concluding that the vote total wasn't substantially different from the official numbers. Not that this satisfied the election truthers, who merely backtracked and said that the methods the auditors used wouldn't have uncovered any of the other 199 types of fraud they alleged without evidence.
The lawsuits were never heard. And when they were dismissed, they were dismissed on standing. To say we know for certain he was lying is pretty uncharitable. He couldn’t have known whether there was fraud as no evidence was ever investigated properly.
Dismissal on standing grounds did not prevent the lawsuits from uncovering fraud; that would have required fraud to have been alleged in the first place. What the lawsuits did was allege improprieties in election procedure and ask that the court throw out the results for an entire state as a remedy, or at least throw out some tranche of ballots, the goal being that if certification could be prevented in enough states it would throw the election into the House. IIRC, these suits never alleged any facts that were in dispute, and thus would not have resulted in any kind of discovery or investigation. These cases being heard on the merits would have simply meant that the parties would have gone into court and argued different issues than they actually argued. Some of these cases were heard on the merits and were found lacking; I doubt the ones dismissed for standing, or laches, or any other affirmative defense would have fared differently had they been allowed to proceed.
You want to file a lawsuit that will actually result in a thorough investigation? File one that makes specific allegations of fraud: Tell a story in the complaint about how specific people took specific actions at specific times. Have actual witnesses on hand whom you can depose under oath, subject to cross-examination. Be prepared to do some of your own cross-examination as the other side puts up their witnesses contradicting yours. Don't be afraid to get subpoenas. Even if you have forensic evidence that your expert says is ironclad, it's worthless unless you have lay witnesses who can substantiate your claims. Saying there's proof that votes were switched is meaningless if you don't know who switched them. In other words, you have to have an actual case. It's not hard. Attorneys manage to file real cases every day, even attorneys who suck.
Rov_Scam
20d ago
You can come up with any number of scenarios that are theoretically plausible, but they're all just conjecture, not evidence. Suppose I have an argument with Smith on Tuesday night. The next morning, I get up to go to work and my car won't start. I sue Smith alleging that he broke into my garage when I was asleep and damaged my car so it wouldn't start. I don't produce any evidence of a break-in. I don't produce any evidence that Smith was anywhere near my house in the relevant time frame. I don't produce any evidence that the vehicle's failure to start was the result of tampering. I don't specify what is preventing the car from starting (battery, fuel system, electrical system, starter, etc.) How seriously should my allegations be taken? I've outlined a plausible scenario, but I haven't provided any but the most general details and I haven't provided any evidence. This is the level the Trump fraud allegations were operating on. Actually, this is above that level, because here there's at least an identifiable person I'm making allegations against. The Trump situation is closer to me getting into an argument with an unidentified Home Depot employee and alleging that someone who works for the company must have done it.
Also the Dem discussion on red mirage can equally be explained as the Dems planned on potentially gaming the vote so they told everyone about the red mirage so that when they cheated they could say “we told you about the red mirage.”
Except this makes little sense. If this were planned months in advance, one would think they wouldn't need to stop counting. Fake ballots could have been ready to go from the outset, not manufactured over the course of a week following the election.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
The law is excruciatingly clear that perpetuity limits don't apply to charitable donations, or charitable trusts, for that matter. Technically speaking, the Rule Against Perpetuities only applies to contingent remainders and executory interests, and charitable donations have neither. Practically speaking, courts and legislators are reluctant to invoke perpetuity limits on charities as a matter of public policy. I'm on the board of a nonprofit, and large donations to the general fund are rare. You can get this money from annual fundraising events, membership fees, and small donations, but if someone is looking to drop serious cash they're going to want to know in advance what projects you have coming up that it can be used for. If your projects consist of ongoing expenses, like salaries or scholarships, you'll need to raise about 20 times the annual cost and invest it so the money is always available. The alternative is that people just don't donate because they don't want their money going into a black hole. Sometimes you can get out of it, but usually only in extraordinary circumstances, and even then you'll need court approval and have to notify the AG. There's a lot of fuckery surrounding charitable orgs as it is, and removing restrictions without good reason only encourages that kind of fuckery.
Rov_Scam
22d ago
Endowments aren't piggy banks that schools can raid whenever they need quick cash. They consist of donor-restricted funds that have strict guidelines on how they can be spent and invested; the purpose of the underlying donations is to fund specific things in perpetuity. If a wealthy donor gives you 5 million to fund the George V. Hamilton Professor of East Asian History (who will be making 200k/year), you can't just fire the professor and spend whatever's left in the endowment. If, for whatever reason, you wanted to end the professorship, you'd have to follow whatever procedures were specified in the original donation to end the endowment, usually under the supervision of the state attorney general. Yeah, these numbers are huge. But they're meant for funding things that are, by definition, already funded.
Rov_Scam
22d ago
It depends on what you mean by "disbanding" the Department of Education. Its abolition has supposedly been a top priority of Republicans more or less from the day it was established, yet I think its nameplate budget and the implication that Federal bureaucrats are meddling in what is supposed to be a local concern create a perception of it that doesn't square with reality. So it largely means whether you're talking about a symbolic reorganization wherein the Department's functions are simply divided among other government agencies, or elimination of the actual programs the Department administers.
We can easily dismiss the first option, since it wouldn't result in any substantive changes other than the huge bill involved for administrative costs relating to the reorganization. At the very least, I'd need to see some sort of comprehensive study suggesting that the cost savings of such a reorganization would justify the cost of doing it. If we're talking about the second option, we need to look at what the Department actually does.
60% of the Department's budget is related to higher education assistance, split roughly evenly between direct loans and Pell Grants. I imagine we'd both agree that the student loan system in this country is fucked up and probably responsible for the massive cost increases schools have been experiencing for decades, but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight. I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight. But it's actually more than this. The same statistics show that 28% of revenue comes from "sales and services". This theoretically includes everything from profits made from the bookstore to t-shirt sales, but the vast majority of this is revenue from university-associated hospitals. While this technically counts toward the entire institution's revenue, I'd imagine that hospital fees subsidize education about as much as tuition covers the costs of the hospital. In other words, these are functionally separate entities whose only real overlap is that the hospital is a teaching hospital for the medical school, so I'm keeping this separate. Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis. Not to mention the fact that a lot of existing students will find themselves with debt from unfinished degrees they can't afford to complete. I'd prefer a system that makes eligibility for federal funding contingent on cost-control, but such a system would require more Federal oversight, not less. This, of course, doesn't even account for all the existing loans that the Department services.
Beyond that huge chunk of the budget, about 15% each goes to Title I grants and special education grants. Title I grants are grants to schools with low-income students to pay for remedial reading and math services. While this may give the impression that the funding goes to low-income school districts, pretty much every school qualifies for some level of targeted funding. Again, the result will be that these programs will be cut entirely or simply replaced by state or local funding, which may be difficult in some areas.
So now we're down to the 10% of the budget that accounts for miscellaneous items like compiling certain statistics, administrative costs, etc. I'm sure there's stuff here that can be cut, but eliminating an entire cabinet-level department in order to trim out a little fat seems like an inefficient way of doing things. Unless we're willing to make some serious changes to education funding and the student loan system in the United States, and talk of eliminating the Department of Education is nothing more than a buzzword that shows we're Serious About Doing Something, so long as that something doesn't actually do anything. If the goal is to eliminate student loans or remedial and special education funding entirely then that's the discussion we should be having, not some red-herring thing where eliminating a department will magically eliminate 200 billion dollars from the budget.
Rov_Scam
27d ago
On the other hand I do think NCAAF is in extreme danger of becoming NFL B league.
Not just an NFL B-league, but the crappiest form of NFL B-league. I'd kill for a true NFL B-league compared to the way this is going to look. No draft, no salary cap, players able to leave whenever they feel like it as soon as another team offers more money. I know I said I didn't want to get into it, but I'll probably make a post next week about why I think the sport is going to reach a breaking point some time within the next decade or so. Suffice it to say that, in addition to all the antitrust stuff that isn't going to go away, I think the networks have overextended themselves a bit with the size of these Power 2 deals. There's only so much money to go around, and God forbid if we enter into a recession, in which case (as my friends in video production always point out) advertising is the first thing to get cut. Even without a recession, comparable future deals just might not be that profitable, especially considering that the SEC has historically taken a lower payout than the Big 10 despite having larger market share. There's nothing I'd like to see more than Florida State negotiate a settlement that's still really expensive, go to the Big 10 but be limited partners for the duration of the existing deal (as are oregon and Washington, who only make about half of what the ACC teams get), only to find that the next deal isn't as lucrative as they had anticipated, which wouldn't be a problem except that they're already in hock to the private equity firm that financed the exit fee.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
I know this is the NFL thread, but it seems like a good place as any to discuss college football as well, as discussions I had at a tailgate party over the weekend have had me thinking about how incredibly goofy the college football landscape has become over the past several years, and what the future may hold.
Part I: Project Rudy
Last week, an article at Yahoo Sports revealed that a group of former Disney executives who now run a private equity firm called Smash Capital have been shopping a proposal to college ADs over the past several months. They propose to form a 70 team super-league. While they don't have any particular teams in mind, the assumption is that the league would include all the current Power 4 teams, plus independent Notre Dame and the Pac-12 rump of Oregon State and Washington State. The league would keep current conferene alignments intact (presumably to avoid conference pushback by preserving the phony baloney jobs of the commissioners) but would negotiate a league-wide grant of media rights that would see teams paid based on 3 tiers. They assume that the first tier of the top 16 teams would get something like double what the Big 10 and SEC are currently getting, the second tier of 22 teams would get about what the Big Ten and SEC are currently getting, and the remaining teams would get something comparable to what the ACC and Big 12 are currently getting. G5/FCS games would be eliminated and replaced with marquee matchups of the top teams that would partially drive the increased revenue, and the backers are supposedly putting up 5.4 billion. There's also supposedly an expanded playoff format as well, but the whole presentation hasn't leaked and details are sparse.
This is one of those proposals that looks good on the surface until you start thinking about it and looking closely at the details. It hits some of the high notes of what college football fans want: Conference stability, promotion/relegation, more playoffs, not playing 3 creampuffs a year, etc. The schools should be salivating at the potential to double their revenue. But there's no way in hell that this pans out, and the effect on fans of schools that aren't blue-bloods isn't clear. First, there's the possibility of an antitrust violation, but that's the least of my concerns. The bigger problem is that schools that can't compete won't necessarily make more money. If your team is in the ACC or Big 12, this is neutral at worst, but if you're a fan of a bottom-tier Big 10 or ACC team, a pay cut is almost certain. If Purdue goes 3–9 now, they still get the same national TV money as Ohio State. Under the proposal, they'd be making less than they are now, and Ohio State would be making significantly more. Furthermore, if a marquee team has a bad year, they aren't going to be happy taking less money. Part of the perversity of college sports is that bad teams often have better ratings (and thus drive more revenue) than good teams. Florida is not going to be happy making Big 12 money just because their record dictates that they do.
The plan, of course, anticipates this, and puts two safeguards in place. The first, dumber, proposal is that 8 teams with huge revenue streams would become "permanent" members of the top tier, and would always get the big bucks. This fails for the simple reason that there are more than 8 teams that think they deserve this distinction. If you make the permanent members Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, USC, Clemson, Georgia, and LSU, it seems okay at first glance. But there's no way Penn State accepts this arrangement. Neither does Florida, or Nebraska, or Oregon. Texas A&M won't, and Oklahoma won't either. And don't get me started on Florida State. The second guardrail, which is more reasonable in one sense and stupider in another, is that promotion/relegation decisions won't be made based on any kind of statistical formula, but on an opaque process determined by some sort of committee. In fact, I can't find anything to indicate that the "top teams" will even be determined by record and not simply based on how valuable the committee feels they are to the brand. If Baylor wins the national title, one can imagine them still being considered Tier 2 due to lack of sustained national interest, not to mention if Northwestern manages to finish at 16 after a good season where they don't actually win anything.
So you already have a system where there isn't any incentive for any individual school to buy in, other than the possibility of the absolute top-tier doubling their incomes. But even if you do get buy-in from everybody, it still doesn't solve the entire problem. The 5.4 billion that Smash Capital is putting up? Well, that's borrowed from future revenues. the idea is that there's a three year transition period, and the money will be paid back when the new league negotiates a new media deal. This isn't entirely unprecedented; schools that change conferences often forgo a full share for the first several years in exchange for interest-free loans that are paid back in future years. This is supposed to ease the burden of dilution on existing schools while giving the new entrants ready cash. The difference is that the amounts involved are relatively small compared to the total revenues, and are based on what the conference is already making. And it only applies to one or two teams in the conference. 5.4 billion needing to be paid out of revenues, presumably with interest, requires some serious revenue increases. By comparison, the power conferences plus Notre Dame currently gross about 2.7 billion in TV money related exclusively to football. revenues would probably have to increase by at least 30% just for them to tread water once the payoff period begins, let alone for them to get the eye-watering increases that are promised. And if the revenues aren't there, who ends up holding the bag? It's not going to be Smash Capital. This proposal is nothing but hot air.
Part II: Insert Joke About Billable Hours Here
Late last year, the Atlantic Coast Conference, anticipating litigation, preemptively filed suit against Florida State in North Carolina. Florida State quickly filed their own suit against the ACC in Florida. Last February, Clemson, who had initially said they weren't pursuing litigation, filed a similar but slightly different suit against the ACC in South Carolina, and the ACC filed their own suit against Clemson in North Carolina the next day. At issue here are conference exit fees and grant of rights agreements.
In 2004, the ACC raided the Big East, perceived to be the weakest major conference, by poaching Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College, the first two of which were perceived to be the strongest programs. The Big East responded by raiding the mid-major Conference USA, and was able to limp along for a few more years, until the ACC came calling again in 2011. The departures of Pitt and Syracuse effectively killed the conference, and West Virginia soon jumped ship to the Big 12. Inspired by this new alignment, the Big 10 poached Maryland from the ACC. Maryland wasn't a strong program, but at the time, media deals involving the nascent Big Ten Network made weak programs in big markets particularly lucrative. The ACC responded by increasing its exit fee to be so large that no school would dare leave. When it renegotiated its broadcast rights with ESPN in 2016, the member schools agreed to grant their media rights to the ACC through the end of the deal, which was soon extended to 2036.
In 2020, the Big Ten and SEC signed lucrative media deals that would pay their members double what ESPN was paying the ACC. Florida State and Clemson, who envision themselves as among college football's elite, were no longer happy with their lot. The ACC money had always been lower, but it wasn't that much lower. Additionally, both of those leagues had since started expanding at a breakneck pace, gobbling up any team that would add value. Surely, another conference would be willing to offer Clemson a better deal than they were currently getting. Surely, Miami and North Carolina thought the same thing, but were biding their time. Florida State, however, made no bones about their wanting out, and the situation was exacerbated when the Playoff committee snubbed an undefeated Seminoles team in favor of an Alabama team with a loss.
The stumbling block, however, is that the current exit fees and grant of rights would make leaving financially ruinous. Exit fees have been around for a while, but they aren't necessarily enforceable. There's a principle in contract law that says that damages have to be proportionate to the actual loss. In some cases the law allows the contracting parties to agree on damages in advance, but courts will only enforce these clauses to the extent that they're a reasonable attemt to estimate damages that would be difficult to prove in the event of breach. Courts will not enforce them to the extent that they are meant to penalize the breaching party. The result of past conference raids was that the remaining members would sue whoever was leaving to collect the exit fee and they'd eventually negotiate a settlement. the Grant of Rights is an entirely different animal, though. Instead of a naked attempt at getting damages for breach, it's essentially no different than an agreement granting a copyright or patent license. If the ACC owns the broadcast rights, then it doesn't matter where Florida St. plays, they get the money from it, and since Florida St. wouldn't be in the conference, they wouldn't get a share of it. How this would actually play out in real life is anyone's guess, and I don't know enough about this kind of thing to make any predictions about what the court would do, but suffice it to say that the cost of Florida St. leaving is estimated to be between 200 and 500 million, and they're suing for declaratory judgment that the exit fee and grant of rights provisions are unenforceable.
As I mentioned above, I'm less interested in the legal details than I am of the overall consequences of these lawsuits. There are two interesting wrinkles. The first is that there's also a fifth lawsuit that was filed by the Florida Attorney General that seeks to make to contents of the ESPN deal public. It came out in litigation that the schools don't actually have their own copies of this agreement due to a confidentiality clause, and the only way they can see it is through personal inspection at ACC headquarters. The more interesting aspect is that it also came out that the ESPN deal doesn't definitively extend until 2036, as was originally thought, but that ESPN has a unilateral option to extend the deal until that date, and that they must make that election by February 2025. If Florida State's suit is successful, there is widespread consensus that it could mean the end of the ACC. It's not so much that the league wouldn't survive without them, but that the absence of any financial penalty would instigate a mass exodus of the stronger teams, leaving the weaker ones holding the bag.
This puts ESPN in an interesting situation. All other things being equal, an freshly-negotiated ACC deal is likely to be worth significantly more than the current deal, so in a normal world, it would be a no-brainer for ESPN to exercise their option. But the litigation changes things. If Florida St. is successful, and the predicted exodus were to occur, the contract would be worthless. And with the other conferences locked into their deals until 2030, it may be to ESPN's benefit to blow the whole thing up. When the ACC's current deal expires in 2026, they'll be in the same position the Pac-12 was last spring. With no TV deal, there's no grant of rights to worry about, and the biggest barrier keeping teams in is removed. To be clear, most ACC members want the conference to survive. The problem is that no one wants to be left without a seat when the music stops, so everyone is behooved to jockey for position early.
At least that was the theory until late last week, when yet another wrinkle emerged in this mysterious deal: It's not a full option like it had been reported. It's actually a complicated situation, the details of which I won't bore you with, but the consensus now is that ESPN is expected to pick up the option because not doing so would put them in a weird situation where they could be subsidizing a television network without any teams, but that's another story entirely. Another wrinkle in this is that it's not entirely clear that Florida St., or anyone else, would even get an invitation to join the SEC or Big Ten even if they could get out of the ACC. Florida St. fans seem to think they'll waltz right into the Big Ten, but that's far from certain. The current Big Ten deal, which runs through 2030, doesn't make any accommodation for expansion. Any increased revenue a new member could provide wouldn't be realized until after that date, and existing members will be reluctant to share too much of the current pie. When the Big Ten added Oregon and Washington at the last minute following the Pac-12's imminent demise, both teams were forced to accept shares far less than the other members, shares that aren't any more than what they had been getting in the Pac-12. Oregon doesn't have to worry about this, with Phil Knight willing to pony up whatever they need, but, aside from some semblance of stability, Washington isn't going to benefit for a while.
Note that that's only a semblance of stability. One possibility is that the new so-called Power 2 renegotiate even larger deals come 2030 that will be enough to feed everybody. The other, and the one some think is inevitable, is that the bigger teams cut the dead weight and form a super conference. If Florida St. isn't content to subsidize Wake Forest and Georgia Tech, then why would they be content to subsidize Illinois and Rutgers? While the dedicated network deals are still lucrative, cord-cutting, and the willingness of networks to pay eye-watering sums for premiere matchups, mean that they aren't the primary drivers of revenue that they once were. Sure, Maryland may get you higher carriage fees in the Baltimore and DC markets, but those pale in comparison to how much you're paying them from a national deal that they don't make much more attractive. One suspects that once the TV deals are up in 2030, the big schools will cut the remnants of the Big Ten and SEC loose and form that new super league, freed of NCAA restrictions and of the Mizzous and Purdues of the world. These schools have no exit fees or grants of rights, because there's no threat of leaving. Until, at least, the blue bloods start talking among themselves about how much money they could be making, and people start getting ideas. Thus is the real reason why Florida St. and Clemson want out. If there's going to be a super league, they don't want their ACC commitment to get in the way, and if it means making less money for a few years, then so be it.
Part III: Burning Down the House to Kill the Cockroaches
I want to shift the talk away from realignment and towards the other big changes that college football has seen the past few years, namely, player payments and the transfer portal. Just to be clear, it used to be against the rules for schools to pay players. In fact, it used to be against the rules for anyone to pay players, to the point that even part-time employment was considered suspect (after all, what does one think when a big donor pays a top recruit a ton of money to ostensibly work at his car dealership one hour per week?) The rule also used to be that if an athlete transferred schools, it came at the cost of a year of eligibility. Transfers still happened, but only if the situation was dire. First, the court ruled that the NCAA couldn't prohibit athletes from monetizing their name, image, or likeness, leading to so-called NIL deals. These deals were ostensibly for promotional purposes, like endorsements, but in reality most of them don't require the recipient to do anything other than play sports. Then, courts ruled that the NCAA couldn't put any prohibitions on transfers, especially since these could prevent them from getting NIL money (in practice, the NCAA had already loosened transfer restrictions). Finally, courts cleared the way for schools to make direct payments to student athletes.
A few years ago, coaches from big schools would recruit student athletes with promises of playing for huge crowds, of playing on TV, or of having a decent chance of getting to the NFL. Coaches from smaller schools would point out that their environment was less competitive and they were thus more likely to get playing time. But if a lesser program managed to snag a gem, they had a chance of making a run for it. Now, schools have to contend with the additional factor of how much money they can get, and they have to contend with this every year. They no longer recruit high school kids but people who are already on the team. After all, if another school is offering better money, there's nothing to stop them from transferring. At first it was thought that lesser schools might benefit from the transfer portal because good players who couldn't get playing time at big schools would be able to transfer more easily. The result, though, was that playing time became less of an inducement to go to smaller schools in the first place. After all, every kid who is offered a scholarship at a top program thinks he can be the starter. Under the old system, he maybe could have been reasoned with. Now, there's no reason not to go to Alabama. Take your shot at the starting job. If you get it, great. If you get benched, transfer. It's a totally different landscape.
While I may bemoan these changes, I really can't argue with them. Jurists from both sides of the aisle concede that the system that was in place for college sports throughout most of its history is ridiculous in any other context, and antitrust law prohibits it. A conservative would bemoan the changes and try to reverse them, or at least limit them. But that's just delaying the inevitable, and probably not by very long. My solution is to accelerate them; blow up the system so violently and completely that whatever remaining shreds of credibility are destroyed. Do something so radical that even the fans of the biggest programs will turn up their noses in disgust. Something that goes beyond what donor money and NIL deals and the transfer portal can accomplish. We need to destroy the last vestiges of NCAA eligibility requirements, and the path is clear.
The recent changes were driven by antitrust law. An athlete sues the NCAA for unreasonably restraining trade, the court agrees (because NCAA restrictions look ridiculous if applied to ordinary businesses), and block in the Jenga tower comes out. But most of these are simply taking them off the top, I want to go after the piece that holds up the whole tower: Time restrictions. Current NCAA rules are complicated but effectively limit players to 4 years of eligibility, and they must be used before your 28th birthday. Of course, there are exceptions for redshirt and COVID years, but the idea is that you get 4 years, and then you're done. If an entire industry had rules limiting how long employees could work there, and there wasn't some seriously good public policy interest at stake, it's unlikely a court would allow this. After all, they're preventing perfectly willing employees from working for companies that want to hire them for entirely arbitrary reasons. There's no conceivable reason that the same shouldn't apply to college football. Players who graduate can already play, provided they're enrolled at the university. If a player graduates after 4 years on the team and still wants to play, why shouldn't he be able to? This makes increasing sense in the world of NIL money, where you're unreasonably restricting his ability to earn a living due to arbitrary criteria. This was basically the same argument in the transfer case brought by the New York AG—the kid wants to transfer because he can make more money, and your arbitrary rules tell him he can't do that.
The effect of this would be dramatic. Most athletes don't peak until their late-20s, but only a few college athletes have any eligibility left by this point. There are plenty of guys out there who could make a college roster if they were only allowed to. And with the money involved, there are plenty of guys in the CFL and whatever the USFL is called now who would do better to stay in college. Once this rule is eliminated, these guys will just enroll in some class at the school where they can get the most money and continue their careers. The top levels of college ball will be dominated by these guys, since they exponentially increase your chances of winning. the practice of signing 30-year-olds who graduated years ago will be mocked at first, but any college team that's serious about winning championships won't have a choice. Pretty soon the 18 to 22-year-olds who dominate the game now will be slowly phased out.
This will have a downstream effect of ruining the NFL as well, because the 21 and 22-year-olds they're used to drafting simply won't have enough playing time to get a good read on. The only draftable players will be in their mid-20s, and guys will be on rookie deals into their 30s. I hate to see this happen and I hope the effect isn't too severe, but it's an inevitable consequence. The endgame here is that the increased ridiculousness of college football effectively becoming a b-league is that the traditional college players, who aren't getting playing time, form a union and strike a deal with whomever the powers that be are. Once a collective bargaining agreement is in place, antitrust rules no longer apply, and some of the provisions that are currently being struck down are implemented again, and maybe new restrictions are imposed that at least recognize that it's a professional league and that if we want to maintain the illusion of amateurism and parity then they need to do some things that were previously unthinkable. I don't know what it will look like, but I think it's inevitable that some kind of breaking point is reached where the product becomes so disgusting that it's forced to change.
Part IV: Conclusion
The last section may seem a bit ridiculous, but it it underscores a point: Nothing is sacred. Not to the courts, and certainly not to anyone who stands to profit. The NCAA is a more or less defunct entity at this point; I don't know how any of their current regulations are defensible under the way the laws have recently been interpreted. I also want to make a larger point, and one that it seems most college football fans don't understand: No changes will be made that cost the big schools money. This would seem so obvious as to be tautological, but it seems like most college football fans haven't figured this out. The internet is full of various proposals to "fix" college football by realigning conferences to more traditional alignments, improving revenue parity, imposing top-down organization, imposing NIL restrictions, or any number of other things. But none of these things improve revenue, so they won't happen. That's one thing about Project Rudy that actually makes sense, even if the rest of it doesn't. It doesn't present itself as anything other than a revenue generator. It doesn't eliminate creampuffs because they're idiotic schedule padding, but because better games are more attractive to TV networks (ironically, they fail to understand that this benefit probably isn't outweighed by the fact that the big schools would lose a home game or two, but TV guys can be myopic). It's main selling point is that it's lucrative. And, for better or worse, that's what we have to deal with.
Rov_Scam
30d ago
No, pickleball is for high school kids and senior citizens. It's a considerably less yuppie version of tennis, in that it's cheaper and involves less skill.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Not AI, and not upscaling. Whenever we look at something in real time, what we can see is limited by how much light can get to our retinas and hence to our brains. We can control this a little bit, through dilation of pupils, but the effect is limited. Similarly, we can't make our brains more light-sensitive than they already are, as we're optimized for normal daytime viewing. A camera doesn't have this limitation. SLRs can use aperture and shutter speed to make things more or less visible than they are in the real world, but phones aren't sophisticated enough for this. What phones (and SLRs as well) can do is make the digital sensor more sensitive by cranking up the ISO settings. Most photographers try to shoot with low ISO settings because cranking these will result in digital noise, but people shooting with their phones aren't this picky. If you're shooting at night, most automatic settings will crank the ISO to something most amateur photographers would consider ungodly. While this does have some effect on image quality, it also means that the camera can see more than your eyes can. The same effect could be achieved on color film by taking a long exposure, though this may cause star trails or other (potentially) unwanted artifacts. Most (all?) of those cool space photos of nebulae and other deep field objects aren't anything you'd be able to see with the naked eye, but are achieved by letting a lot of light in, using software to stack photos, and other camera tricks. This isn't to say that you're being lied to by "enhancements"; everything you're seeing is actually there, our visual systems just aren't equipped to see it in real time.
Okay then, replace it with a six pack of beer from Sheetz, or a candy bar, or whatever the hell else you think kids steal these days.
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