Rov_Scam
5hr ago
It isn't an escalation if all they're trying to do is get the money back. While going after people who had nothing to with the impropriety of the payments may seem unfair, it's something the government does all the time. In this case, though, the government might not have a choice. If Trump had structured the settlement so the money went directly to him, and he then gave the money away, it would be a straightforward case of suing him to get the money back. But instead, he wants to implement a complicated system where he creates a quasi-government agency that he controls and uses it to distribute the money. If he gets sued in the future he's going to argue that since he never took any of the money he's not on the hook to pay it back. If this agency or commission or whatever still has the money, then it's easy, but if they've already given it away, then the government has to go after whom it was given to. Any litigation surrounding this is going to be incredibly complicated, and any attorney is going to have to sue anyone whom they plausibly have a claim against. Given that the money is to be distributed by what is a quasi-government agency, this takes on a similar tenor as going after any other government benefit overpayment.
In other words, it's not escalation, just the nature of litigation. I'm currently defending a case where we forced the plaintiff to sue his daughter. He's not asking for any damages, but I have an argument that she's liable for contribution (which I probably won't use). She still had to hire her own attorney, and the claim isn't covered by insurance. Whenever you file a lawsuit, you have to account for the possibility that there is going to be some blowback that can affect third parties you didn't intend to involve.
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
Ironic or not, it's not like these kind of clawbacks aren't par for the course. If a welfare recipient gets an overpayment, even if it was because of a cockup on the government's part, the government still expects them to pay it back. They might cut them a break due to financial hardship, but they still have to go through the process. When I was doing bankruptcy, I regularly had to tell clients that no, you can't pay your brother the money you owe him before you file, because the trustee will sue your brother to get it back, and no, you can't offer your best friend your hunting camp as part of a deal too good to be true, or the trustee will have that transfer undone. But as I plan to elaborate on in another comment, the government might not have a choice.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
Except that's the complete opposite of what happened here. The government did not sue Trump.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
To be clear, I'm not actually in favor of reparations. But why compromise when the power of the bullshit lawsuit is at your disposal?
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
I understand what you're saying but that's all besides the point. Whether it's a one to one comparison or not, a bullshit lawsuit is a bullshit lawsuit,.and unless the courts undo this, you're opening up the possibility that anyone can use a bullshit lawsuit to fund whatever pet projects you can't get congressional appropriation for.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
Only Donald Trump could pardon the January 6 defendants and then ruin their lives under the guise of charity. Here's how I see this playing out:
- Independent Democratic group sues the government to stop the payments
- Long fight over standing ensues
- Democrats win White House in 2028; DOJ takes over case
- In the meantime, a bunch of January 6 defendants have received checks from the fund
- DOJ files new lawsuit against the fund's administrators, along with everyone who received a check
- Having spent the money before the Democratic takeover, the fund is now administered by stooges who have no money or interest in actually fighting the suit and are only named as an essential party
- The suit is now an unwieldy mass of defendants, most of whom have hired local counsel who aren't in a position to litigate the complex, novel legal issues involved
- January 6 defendants who didn't immediately put their money into escrow are forced into the Hobson's choice of spending it on legal representation or settling by paying a large amount of their meagure fortune to the Preschooler's Trans Education Fund.
Rov_Scam
23hr ago
Those were real lawsuits that the government filed where the defendants were going to have to pay someone no matter what, the only question being how much and to whom. It's not a practice I endorse, but it's in a totally different league than personally suing an entity you control in a case that would go nowhere for no reason other than extracting money out of them that they wouldn't have to pay if the suit actually went forward.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It's rare that I agree with you but you're 100% right about this. It's a travesty that groups who are subject to wrongs perpetrated by the very governments that are supposed to protect them are often left with no recourse and no compensation. While I can certainly sympathize with a small group of conservatives who were unfairly targeted by the IRS under the Obama administration, that is unfortunately nothing compared with the millions of Black Americans who are still suffering as the result of official government policy. First, after being brought here against their will to perform manual labor, slavery was enshrined within the US Constitution for the first 80 or so years of our nation's existence. Following abolition, things didn't get much better, as they were routinely discriminated against, often as a matter of official government policy, and routinely denied the very rights the Reconstruction Amendments sought to recognize. Even in areas where discrimination was not enshrined into law, they were still almost universally denied the opportunity to work in good jobs, live where they wanted to, and otherwise be treated like any other member of society. The results of these centuries of discrimination have been nothing short of catastrophic for Black Americans; even as we enacted legislation to address these wrongs in the 1960s, Blacks still lag behind others in almost every metric.
Given these circumstances, one would think that providing some sort of reparation for the harms the government has inflicted upon blacks would be a no-brainer in these more enlightened times, but that has unfortunately not been the case. Fully half of the country seeks to blame Blacks themselves for their own plight, arguing that if they only were willing to work a little harder things would magically improve for them. Some even wave their hands and explain the situation through the simple intellectual and moral inferiority of Blacks, echoing the slave masters of 200 years ago. Even on the left, the more wishy-washy white people voice concerns about what reparations would look like, who would qualify for them, and a host of other practical concerns that would threaten to sink any program from the beginning. Righting these wrongs has become all but politically impossible.
Luckily, though, Donald J. Trump has unlocked the cheat code to get around an ineffective, even hostile Congress. All that is needed in the next Democratic administration is for a civil rights group to file a class action suit against the US government. No legitimate claim? No problem! This will never get close to an actual courtroom, as president AOC will be more than happy to offer a generous settlement package before the first motion is filed. No debate, no working out the messy details, just pick a strategy and go for it. Because when you look at all that's happened, $1.619 trillion is getting off easy.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Nah, the Black Album was a total sellout. ...And Justice for All would have been good except you can't hear any bass. The last good Metallica album was Master of Puppets /s
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I don't know if it would have cost a fortune, at least not compared to what they already paid. I don't think they bought all the rights, just that they paid a little extra to use the songs in the game indefinitely and not for five years or whatever. I doubt the agreement even would allow them to use the songs in another game.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Most brokers are probably already asking those questions, and if they aren't, I'd wonder why their attorneys haven't developed a standardized form yet. The only suspect one is the last one, since English comprehension would only be relevant if the driver misread a sign or something. You could still ask at the deposition, but probably not at trial.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
If you're talking about '99 onward it was an entirely different situation as Napster made a whole world of music available that hadn't been accessible before, and the internet made music discovery a lot easier. I had heard of Joy Division in the '90s, but only because as a music nerd I had a bunch of record review guides (which are sitting on a bookshelf behind me as I type this). I had no particular interest in them, but trying to find well-reviewd records from major bands was a chore because you were at the mercy of what the record store had in stock. Floor space was limited, and they had to stock CDs and cassettes, so they were only going to carry what they could sell, which meant mostly new releases and compilations. It seems odd to think about now, but as someone who was a huge Beatles fan I don't recall any record store having all their studio albums in stock at the same time, even after the surge in interest generated by the Anthology documentary. The Anthology compilations, which are collections of unreleased material that nobody cares about any more, were always well-stocked, on the other hand. What people liked was largely defined by what was available, and unless there was some big cultural change, catalog releases that didn't sell well to begin with weren't likely to be available outside of special order, which was usually limited to independent shops in urban areas that high school kids didn't shop at.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I don't remember anyone in the 90s making tapes for their boyfriend or girlfriend, just people occasionally making tapes for friends, but the order never mattering. If you had a CD with three really good songs on it you wanted to include you'd just put them one after the other and then go to the next CD. Like you said, just having a copy of the song was the point, because music was expensive. "Mixtape" is a term from hip hop that got appropriated for the phenomenon after people stopped buying cassettes. Even in High Fidelity, they're called compilation tapes, but most people didn't call them anything. When we first got a car with a tape deck in it circa 1995 my mom borrowed a bunch of my uncle's CDs and made a tape that she proceeded to play in the car ad nauseum for the next several years. We always called it "The Tape". I remember getting sick of it and finding another tape that my other uncle had made her from stuff dubbed of of albums in the '80s, and we called it "The Other Tape".
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I don't have much shipping knowledge but I can make some predictions based on my knowledge of personal injury litigation generally. Suppose a trucker gets into a crash with an automobile, the trucker is at fault, and the injured driver of the auto sues the trucking company. Let's say the driver got rear-ended while waiting at a stoplight, and the driver is employed by the trucking company. The trucking company will be responsible for the driver's negligence, and thus the entirety of the judgment, since in this case a jury would be likely to find the trucker 100% at fault. The broker's, however, is not directly liable for the negligence of the trucker; they are only liable to the extent that they knew or should have known that using that particular company was unjustifiably risky. If the trucking company in the example was a reputable outfit with a safety record typical of the industry, it's unlikely that the broker would be at fault. If it was a disreputable company with a terrible safety record or a fly-by-night outfit that they didn't properly vet and hired because they came in with the low bid, then it's more likely that they will be found responsible. But in the event that they are responsible, their share of the settlement is going to be much lower than that of the trucking company.
The extent to which this will affect the industry is hard to judge, because it all depends on custom, and how likely the ruling is to affect custom. The most immediate effect I can see is that every PI case involving a truck will name the broker as defendant if there is one, even in cases where the broker has no liability. While the ultimate result of many of these will be that the plaintiff agrees to voluntarily dismiss the broker from the suit, the broker will still incur defense costs, which will be reflected in insurance premiums. Here's where custom comes in: It could be the case that PI lawyers are already suing brokers in these cases, but the brokers are settling before the issue can be decided. The brokers may have heretofore taken an official stance that they were immune to such suits, but they may have been willing to settle them anyway, or they may have been let out of the case after discovery didn't uncover any evidence of negligent hiring.
If this seems odd to you, keep in mind that litigating a case to verdict is very expensive, the potential for huge losses exists in the event of an unfavorable award, the broker's share of the damages is relatively low in a fair trial, and one defendant can't force another defendant's hand. Take the example above. Suppose that both defendants take the case to trial, and the jury awards the plaintiff $3 million, apportioned 80% to the trucking company and 20% to the broker. During the trial, plaintiff's counsel has to argue that both the trucking company and the broker are negligent. Now suppose that the trucking company settles before trial, which is likely to happen, especially since the case isn't that unusual. The broker will file a motion for summary judgment arguing that the case is preemted by Federal law, but it's not likely to be granted, especially in state court. Unless the issue is well-settled, most judges are unlikely to boot a case entirely at the summary judgment stage over a technicality. So long as the Plaintiff can make a plausible argument that the case should continue, a judge is likely to grant it. And even if they get dismissed sometimes, sometimes isn't all the time.
Now the situation is quite different. At trial, the plaintiff no longer has to prove that the trucking company was negligent, and they have every incentive to try to stick the broker with as much of a share of the verdict as possible. Now the broker's situation gets a lot more complicated since in addition to their usual defense they have to now put on a negligence case against the trucking company, which would be difficult enough if they weren't also trying to argue that they had no idea how irresponsible that company was. And if by some miracle you get a defense verdict, that doesn't resolve the immunity issue, so you'd have to try the whole thing again next time.
Given that resolving the issue would involve going to trial, losing, and getting it overturned on appeal, there's significant incentive to settle, especially when the threat of the case being overturned on appeal may put downward pressure on the settlement. Extra especially when you aren't even the target defendant. Cases usually only go to trial when something goes completely off the rails. The point I'm making is that if it's already customary for brokers to get sued and pay settlements in these cases, then clarification isn't going to have much of an effect other than that the settlement amounts may go up a little. The effect on legal fees is likely to be minimal. If the broker being sued here was a novelty, then the effect will be much bigger. That being said, time-limited searches of PI attorney websites seem to suggest that going after brokers was a common practice well before this case was decided.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I think owner operators will be fine. They already have to carry their own insurance, and it's much easier for a broker to vet a single driver than a company with a revolving door of people who couldn't get hired anywhere else. The law that putatively granted immunity to brokers was enacted in 1994; it's not like owner-operators didn't exist before then.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Who is writing these questions and who is grading the responses? I can't speak to this particular exam, but when you take the bar you have to buy an expensive prep course run by a private company and the practice exams are graded by people who work for the company, who aren't the same as the people who will be grading the actual test. Assuming your situation is similar, it wouldn't surprise me if the mocks are being graded by non-practicing doctors who may not be doing the best job, especially, if like me, you went with a less expensive option than the industry standard. That being said, I never got any obviously bad feedback. I'd only be worried if the guy who graded your practice test is representative of who grades the real one.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Spammers are on to that. Most of the junk mail I get these days has features ranging from faux handwriting on one end of the spectrum to full blown security strips on the other, all in service of convincing the recipient that this totally isn't junk mail and he should take that all important first step: Opening the envelope.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Surrealism in general doesn't have a good reputation these days, and wasn't much beloved even in its time.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
There is some discussion below about the game Mixtape, and the suspicion that it AI was used to some extent. I haven't played video games in a long time, and what I know about them could fit on the head of a pin, but as a 90s kid I became intrigued by the nostalgia that this game was supposedly aiming at, and how the producers supposedly got it all wrong, so I naturally did a little research to see what the big deal was. One of the comments below points out that in games like Red Dead Redemption a murderous outlaw wouldn't dare also be a racist, and while political sentiments might be the most obvious and ham-fisted examples of this, there's a larger trend of assigning contemporary values to historical eras. In the case of Red Dead Redemption I'd argue that this is more forgivable, as the further back one goes in history the less source material one has. After all, nobody who remembers the 1890s is alive today to tell you what you got wrong, so one can be forgiven for making some assumptions out of necessity.
But there are plenty of people who remember the '90s. If we narrow in on the specific demographic and assume that the game takes place some time in June 1995, there are about 3 million people who would have been graduating high school and are alive today to talk about it. But even there you run into problems, because the people from the Class of 1995 most willing to talk about their high school experience are the ones most likely to idealize it. Most contemporary reminiscences of 1995 are from the kind of hipster journalists who want to make it sound like they were cooler than they actually were, and thus use their current selves as stand-ins for their high school ones. I don't want to suggest that these people are lying about the past, simply that there is a tendency to emphasize that which has stood the test of time and conforms to contemporary tastes. The problem arises when people who were born too late to experience an era become influenced by contemporary ideas about what made that era cool and assume that the coolness that they perceive was typical. And it compounds further when this false nostalgia includes a dash of contemporary coolness for good measure.
The first time I noticed this in my adult life was when Vaporwave took off in the early 2010s. As a meditation on the nature of nostalgia it's not without interest, but as a representation of the aesthetic of 1992 it's absurd. The visuals suited the style fine, as the millennial memory of the era is as influenced as much by worn out VHS tapes as actual experience. But the music had more to do with creating a nostalgic mood than it did with evoking anything that was being played on the radio between 1987 and 1998. The movement's canonical song, "Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing" by Macintosh Plus, was nothing more than a slowed down and chopped up remix of Diana Ross's "It's Your Move". More original works in the genre can be described as synthwave with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. The tunes are enjoyable enough, but the insistence of pairing them with found VHS footage of home videos and toy commercials is puzzling, since the sound is more 80s than 90s.
Given the right context, this isn't a mortal sin. One of the watershed moments in vaporwave's development was the discovery and upload of tape reel of K-Mart muzak from 1988, and the subsequent uploads of cassettes from later years. The visuals often included shots of store interiors or clips taken from commercials. To the extent that vaporwave sought to evoke nostalgia, it was an oddly specific nostalgia for a certain kind of consumer capitalism. And even that's an unusual choice, since the period we're supposed to be nostalgic for sits on the divide between two very different eras—the more traditional, jingle-based make your product look like loads of fun on one side and the more detached, ironic style of turning the commercial into a work of art that can be appreciated on its own terms on the other. Just look at beer commercials; the ads of the early 90s showed men at pools surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis, clearly trying to impart an association of the product with parties and the opposite sex. By the middle of the decade they had frogs in a swamp each croaking out one syllable of the brand name. What this was supposed to say about Budweiser was anyone's guess, but it's one of the most iconic commercials of the era.
This all makes sense when you consider that Macintosh Plus and many of the other top vaporwave practitioners weren't born until the early 90s. Their earliest memories would not have been until the end of the era they were trying to evoke, and their nostalgia was largely for an imagined world based on the detritus of the era that ended up on the internet. It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie. Because if vaporwave did give an accurate impression of what life was like in 1992, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. There wasn't much better about 1992 as compared to today, and quite a bit was worse. More importantly, 1992 doesn't exist as a discrete entity that you can visit. I remember 1992, and at the time there was nothing more exciting about it than there is about 2026. If you were to visit 1992 as a tourist, you would be aware of that fact and unable to experience things as you remember. But if you were to visit 1992 while not conscious that it wasn't the current year, then there would be nothing interesting about it; it would just be normal. And no, I'm not nostalgic for my childhood either. It was great, mind you, but people forget that when you're a kid all you want is to be older. Every minor decision is made by your parents: Who your friends are, what time you go to bed, what you have for dinner, what you can watch on television, how you spend your Saturdays. Yes, I remember retail outlets in the early 90s. I distinctly remember standing for what seemed like hours as my mother looked at every article of clothing in the store, and when the women's department was finally exhausted she moved on to babies because of some relative's kid, and at that point I was begging to go to domestics, or, preferably, home. If I go back to 1992 I do not want to spend it in a K-Mart.
Which brings us to Mixtape. It was almost certainly created by people who are too young to recall the era they're trying to evoke, because anyone old enough would have been well into their 40s by the time of the game's development. Much has been made of the whole "using a pencil to rewind a tape" thing, and while nobody would have done that just to rewind it, there was a use case. If the player mangled your tape, which wasn't an uncommon occurrence, you would usually use a pencil to wind it back up once you got it disentangled from the player. But that's beside the point, because the idea of a mixtape as something that you give as a gift to that special someone has more to do with our contemporary interpretation of 90s culture than to actual 90s culture. I don't want to suggest that the practice never happened. But it certainly wasn't widespread. Mixtapes were mostly something you made for yourself, either because few cars had CD players or because you were taping off the radio.
The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas. I can tell you that in 1997 the going rate for a CD at Music Oasis was $15, which is $30 in today's money per the CPI, more when you take into consideration that the average teenager in those days was more likely to make under $5/hour than today's teenager is likely to make more than 10. I looked through a lot of CD binders in my time, and most people only had like 15 CDs, and people who were really into music might have had about 20. If you were relying on your own collection for material, the well would have dried up fast, especially considering that most people only bought CDs for the hits. Most mixtapes per se were things that you made for yourself, either by borrowing from friends or taping off the radio. To the extent that most people made mixtapes for other people, they were likely to just record the whole album, or record the good songs from their CDs without regard for the running order.
The idea that mixtapes were curated items derives from the movie High Fidelity. Except in the film, the characters who are obsessed with mixtapes are music geeks who work in a record store. They aren't representative of the general public, let alone high school kids. To the extent that they existed they were, like mall music, not something that most people thought much about. John Cusack's monologue at the end of the film is notable because it's unusual. But beyond the overstated relevance of mixtapes, the game fails for its overreverence for the 80s.
I took a peek at the soundtrack, and it mostly consists of either stuff from the 80s or indie stuff from the 90s that wasn't popular. This can't be stated strongly enough, but nothing about the 80s was considered cool in the 90s. The entire decade was seen as anathema to any modern sensibilities. The divide in commercials was representative of a larger cultural shift, whereby grunge swept everything else away. By 1995, alternative rock had become mainstream to the point that anything from the previous decade sounded incredibly dated. The idea that high schoolers in 1995 would listen to Devo would have seemed laughable. The idea that they would listen to Joy Division or the Jesus and Mary Chain would have seemed puzzling, because most teenagers wouldn't have even heard of either of those bands. Their stuff was technically available, but in a city like Pittsburgh you would have had to go to a place like Dave's Music Mine on the South Side to find anything like that. A typical National Record Mart in the mall was unlikely to have it, and if they did, you would pay top dollar for it. A discount place like Music Oasis or K-Mart? Forget about it. Even in the 2000s I was having trouble finding classics like The Band's Music from Big Pink in normal CD stores; kids who were into non-mainstream music had to go into the city to find it.
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia. The same people may tell you now about what they liked in the 80s, but that's with 30 years of perspective. High school kids trying to be cool aren't sitting around talking about what they liked when they were 8. In the early 2000s I certainly wasn't having debates about the best 90s movies.
When all that changes for most people is college. It's only then, once you're out of the coolness rat race, that you get over yourself and start getting nostalgic over your childhood. My own college experience was a bit different, because the 90s didn't feel like they had ended yet culturally, and the 80s were starting to lose their stigma. But nonetheless, that's when most people widen their cultural horizons and realize how cloistered their earlier lives had been, and it's easy for us to look back at our lives and assume that those are the same people we were in high school. And when someone younger consults an LLM, they're bound to get a distilled, distorted version of whatever our collective memory tells us the past was like. And when we don't rely on those distillations, it isn't much better, because we put too much stock in what we ignored, and end up with vaporwave. What can be done about this? Detailed research is one possibility, but even that may be hopeless. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I did a post a while back about how slop has always existed and AI slop doesn't change that. Slop art has existed since at least the 50s, and you've probably seen more of it in real life than you have actual art. They're called decor paintings and they're mass produced in Asia. You buy them at places like Hobby Lobby or those starving artist exhibitions they have in ballrooms of chain hotels. They may have a dozen paintings that are almost identical, all organized based on general style and color scheme so they'll match the rug and upholstery. They could have done the same experiment 50 years ago to prove that the guy on the street couldn't tell the imitation Winslow Homer from a cheap motel wall from the real thing.
If you want to get highbrow about the whole thing, watch the Orson Welles documentary F for Fake. It's about hoaxes in general, but he focuses on an art forger named Elmyr de Hory, who would fake the style of recognized (and deceased) artists and pass them off as works that were newly discovered. He ended up getting caught and spent time in jail, but it raises questions about the nature of what we value in art. The same can be said about the desire to have an original. If the only thing you care about is the immediate aesthetic impact, then the going rate for a Monet should be about $250, which is the price the Met sells reproductions for. Cheaper if you get a print. The frame will cost more than the painting. But that's obviously not the case, and it never has been the case, and nothing about AI will change that.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I agree, but I don't think that's what Graeber was referring to; hell, I started reading the book before deciding that the whole idea was dogshit and he didn't mention anything like that when describing his categories of bullshit jobs. All that did was show that he has no idea what adds value for a company. For instance, one of his canonical examples was companies that have receptionists even though they only get a couple calls a day. He then shows his hand by saying that the only reason they do that is so they can put on airs for the few customers they actually have. But that can be a source of prestige, and if it ends up being a bad use of money, that's a business decision for the company to make. I"m in law, and it's typical for most firms to only post a general phone number for the company and route all calls through the secretary (though they do other important work as well). I mostly have corporate clients who schedule Zoom calls on the rare occasions they want to speak, so I don't get many normal phone calls. But I do get some, and when I do the secretaries always act suspicious and reluctant when they ask me if I can put them through, as though it would be a huge imposition for me to have to talk to some rando.
Imagine you're running a small law firm that does probate work. It's just you and a secretary who also helps out with the business end of things. You'd like to take all your calls personally, but sometimes you're meeting with a client or at the courthouse and won't be available, and your secretary may be in client meetings with you or running other errands. You may only get two calls a day, but if they're from prospective clients each one could be worth thousands of dollars. You can automate this system and use voicemail or some kind of electronic scheduling service, but when confronted with this, most people will just hang up and call someone else. The receptionist can at least answer basic questions about what the firm does and if you're only tied up for another 20 minutes might be able to get that client in your office that same day.
Graeber seems to think that it's all part of a status game, as if it were all a bunch of greedy capitalists trying to impress each other with how much money they spend. But if you're a client who was actually able to get me on the phone and you show up at the office to a waiting room that's still empty after five minutes because the attorney is either with another client or just doing work, how is that going to affect your impression of the firm? People don't usually show up to law offices for fun reasons, and even something as simple as having someone to tell you to have a seat and the lawyer will be out in a few minutes and would you like some coffee in the meantime adds a lot of value. I'm not saying that it would necessarily make sense for our solo practitioner to do this, just that if a solo told me that he did I wouldn't think it was that unusual.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that Graeber's entire explanation for the phenomenon is bullshit itself. I could sympathize with him more if his theory was that bullshit jobs exist because of legacy practices that haven't been updated, or that some people are bad at business, or that executives are so far removed from the operations of their company that they don't know where value is being created, or that there's excessive regulation. To the contrary, he argues that it's all part of a capitalist system that requires the attorney to chain a young woman to a desk for 8 hours a day in exchange for barely enough money to survive because the system demands control.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
If the bureaucracy is being imposed from within the corporation, it's one thing, but it's totally different if it's a necessary response to legislation. At that point it's less about the job itself being bullshit and more about disagreement with the underlying policy. If the job performs the function of complying with the law, it's a fairly large value add compared with the penalties that would be imposed if the work weren't done. To give an example of a regulation that can come across as bullshit to some people, the EPA requires erosion and sedimentation (E&S) permits for construction projects that involve disturbing a certain amount of earth. Depending on the size and location of the project, you may need to apply for a permit, not need anything, or need to have an E&S plan on site but not need prior approval. This third category can come across as bullshit to some people, because it involves paying an engineer thousands of dollars to publish a report that no one is going to read, especially if the conclusion is that no special precautions involving erosion need to be taken.
You could just as soon not get a plan and no one would be the wiser. Except if runoff from the jobsite ends up washing onto your neighbor's property and he asks to see the plan and you don't have one. If you end up getting sued over excessive runoff causing damage, not having a plan to deal with erosion is a pretty big matzo ball to have hanging over the litigation. Sure, the government could eliminate E&S requirements entirely, but that only means that when a problem happens you get to spend several years litigating it. The tradeoff is that you minimize erosion problems on all projects from the beginning, and if you do get sued it's nice to be able to say that you had an E&S plan.
The problem I have with the bullshit jobs theory in general is that somebody who isn't familiar with a business presumes that they know how to run it better and knows what work contributes value and what doesn't. This is the fundamental issue I have with AI gurus saying that LLMs are going to take your job. Really? Because chances are they have no idea what you actually do, let alone what value it provides the company. They think of everything in terms of outputs and assume that being able to generate the output is the beginning and end of the value the employee provides to the company. It's a prime example of Rory Sutherland's Doorman Fallacy: A consultant to a hotel company sees the doorman's job as opening the door, and he tells the hotel that they can save a ton of money by replacing the doorman with an automatic system. But the doorman does more than open the door. He calls cabs, he deals with package deliveries, he provides a certain amount of security, he gives the hotel a degree of prestige, etc. Since it's impossible to quantify how much business you're getting as a result of these little services, it's easy to fall into the trap where you believe that automating away the doorman is an automatic windfall, especially when nobody is ever going to say in a customer survey that the existence of a doorman played any role in selecting the hotel.
In this specific case, we have to look at the statute that was violated. It calls for either actual damages or statutory damages of $1,000 per disclosure. Since the latter would only get him $36,000 or thereabouts, he obviously wants to go for the former (the complaint asks for both, however the statutory damage claim relies on a theory that it's a separate violation for everyone who saw the records, a theory that the Supreme Court has previously rejected). This is rarely done in the real cases, and is especially difficult here, since it's difficult to assign an amount certain to the losses. A fact pattern where actual damages would be proven would be if a guy owns a business, it's leaked to customers that the IRS is investigating the business, and there's an obvious dropoff in earnings following the disclosure. This is where things get really difficult for Trump, since in a properly adversarial proceeding you wouldn't discuss settlement until after discovery is substantially complete.
I've settled a lot of cases and most economic damage claims are pretty straightforward. Assuming you have medical/repair bills, a normal salary, and a condition that prevents you from working. More speculative damages are a fucking mess. I have a case that's been going on forever where a guy is claiming damages from a business that he and his brother were going to start but couldn't because of his injury. The Plaintiff was deposed for 9 days, the brother for 17 days, another brother and the elderly mother were deposed, we deposed the brother's sketchy, unlicensed accountant/business advisor. The Plaintiff produced a business analysis document he had prepared before the suit. The defense hired their own economic expert to refute the report, which was hearsay anyway because it wasn't prepared for preparation and he can't produce a rep from the company that produced it. The case was filed in 2013; I took it over in 2023 and it's currently listed to go to trial in September but it's been on many trial lists and I would be shocked if it doesn't get removed again.
Now take a guy like Trump whose wheelings and dealings are a lot more complicated than a guy who wanted to open a fucking gas station and subject his finances to this kind of scrutiny. Considering that the leaked tax returns showed he had been claiming business losses for decades, proof of actual damages would likely require that he was losing even more money after the disclosures, unless he could point to a deal worth a certain amount that got cancelled or something like that. In other words, all of the sensitive financial information that Trump didn't want to disclose to begin with would now be at issue, along with information from years that weren't disclosed. If you don't think this is fair, keep in mind that the defense wouldn't be trying to get this information from him; they would just as soon not see it entered into evidence. He would have to submit it voluntarily and put himself up for deposition or the court would just dismiss the damage claim for lack of evidence. Assuming he can prove actual damages, punitive damages are a possibility in this case, though it's hard to estimate what they would be. (It's a matter of dispute, for complicated reasons, whether punitive damages would be available if the plaintiff were only able to prove statutory damages).
So what's it worth? Assuming a pre-discovery settlement, spitballing based on the assumption that discovery is going to be long and costly and unlikely to prove anything definitive, and that a jury is going to be unwilling to give Trump (who isn't exactly doing badly) more money than they would to a personal injury plaintiff who suffered serious damages, I'd probably throw 3 million out there and see what their counteroffer is. If it's something in the ballpark, say 10 million or under, I'd start negotiating. But anything more than that and I'd ask counsel if he had a case management order in mind or if he wants me to make a proposal first. I don't think there's any way Trump sticks with this if he actually has to go through with litigation. I don't think there's any way Trump is going to be able to prove that he's anywhere close to 1.8 billion dollars poorer because of these disclosures.
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