Rov_Scam
13d ago
You'd honestly have to do more than that. I'm a litigator, and I regularly attend Plaintiff's depositions. Most of the deponents understand that, while unpleasant, it's part of the process. A few however, act like the whole thing is bullshit and get annoyed any time a lawyer jumps in and wants to ask questions. I want to tell these people that they're suing my company and that they're probably going to get a large settlement so the least they can do is answer ten minutes of questions and if that's too much to ask then they can drop the case and go home right now.
I understand that testifying is inconvenient, but it's part of the process. If we could snap our fingers and put the bad guys in jail, we'd do that, but that isn't how it works. If a shop owner expects the legal system to convict shoplifters, then participating in the system isn't too much to ask.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
It includes more people than you think it does. I can recall the following instances from high school where I was either aware of or partially complicit in theft:
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One friend of mine would steal practically anything he could out of museum gift shops whenever we were on field trips. I don't even know that he necessarily wanted the stuff he was stealing. He was a good kid who got good grades and came from a good family. He's currently some kind of engineer for General Electric.
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A group of us decided to whitewash the local graffiti tunnel just after all the seniors in our graduating class painted their names on it. A friend who worked at Wal Mart put several hundred dollars worth of white paint on the loading dock for us to steal. We kept joking about it being a heist. I wasn't there for the actual heist, but I participated in the whitewashing.
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Two friends of mine were convicted in juvie court for stealing plants from a local nursery that they intended to give as Mother's Day gifts.
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On the band trip junior year my roommates and a few other friends did a grab and run of beer cans out of the cooler in the hotel bar. My role was to create a distraction by trying to get served underage and getting into an argument with the bartender.
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I was at a Halloween party and a bunch of us piled into a Dodge Neon and drove to a farm field nearby where we proceeded to grab pumpkins and throw them in the back of this one kid's El Camino. This fat, black cop who was the local fuzz showed up and started chasing us while running with a flashlight. I remember I had to jump a fence at the edge of the field and I actually stopped to let him catch up because I wanted to see how he negotiated it; he was trying to wriggle his fat ass underneath it and I started laughing before continuing running. We all had to walk back to the party, and when the officer showed up and saw all the pumpkins my friend's parents said that they told everyone to bring a pumpkin to the party.
I'm not aware of any of the people involved in the above incidents having any contact with the law whatsoever as adults. I also spent 4 years working for the Boy Scouts and dealing with kids all the time who, while I don't have any specific knowledge of criminal activities, they were the kind of jackwagons who I wouldn't be surprised if they stole something. The entitled rich kid brats who are bound and determined to see how close to the line they can get before I have a talk with their scoutmaster about my ending their participation in my program.
When people say shit like this I always get an image of the naive mom who says "well certainly my David would never do anything like that!" Kids are idiots, and if you think that the impact of harsh punishments for petty crime among teenagers would be limited to minorities and poor people, well, I have some swampland in Jersey for sale.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I mean, yeah. Boost pay for prosecutors and hire more of them. Same for public defenders. Expand the courts. Give police enough money that they can actually investigate all of the crimes that are reported to them. Make juror compensation $500/day so people will stop trying to get out of it. I don't have any problem with any of this. But that's not the world we live in. the point I was making wasn't that you can't make changes to fix these things, but that the reason for this goes beyond woke prosecutors deciding they don't want to charge shoplifting.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
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.
Rov_Scam
14d 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
14d 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
14d 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
14d 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
15d 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
16d 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
17d 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
17d 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
17d 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
19d 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
20d 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
21d 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
21d 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
21d 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
22d 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
23d 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
23d 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
24d 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.
I think you misunderstand my point. The police will make arrests for retail theft. District attorneys will prosecute. There's no reluctance whatsoever on the part of those who are tasked with enforcing the law. These are, on paper, some of the easiest cases to prosecute. The problem is that the victims of these crimes are unwilling to make a minimal effort to engage in necessary participation. Police and prosecutors aren't going to waste their time and the taxpayer's money pursing cases where they can't get a conviction because the victim won't participate. I have no interest in upending centuries of well-established constitutional protections because of the apathy of those the laws are designed to protect.
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