Rov_Scam
17hr ago
There was a case in Allegheny County earlier this year in a similar vein, though it wasn't of the type to result in an opinion. A woman with cancer sued Johnson & Johnson claiming that their talcum powder contained asbestos. Plaintiff's counsel is a highly aggressive national plaintiff's firm out of Texas who regularly engage in questionable practices just to piss off defendants. They drive a hard bargain and aren't afraid to take a case to verdict. I actually sat in on this one for a few hours while I was at the courthouse attending to another matter, but I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to speculate on how the jury reached their conclusion. Anyway, per the verdict slip, the jury found that J&J's talcum powder did indeed contain asbestos, but that the Plaintiff had insufficiently proven that exposure to the powder caused her illness. The jury accordingly awarded $0 in compensatory damages. However, because they still thought J&J acted poorly, they tacked on $16 million in punitive damages. Unfortunately for the Plaintiff, since you can't receive punitive damages if the defendant isn't liable, she walked away with nothing, and the aggressive Plaintiff's firm who was used to winning just blew a couple hundred grand litigating a defense verdict that would have netted them millions if the jury had awarded a dollar for compensation.
The case you posted is an interesting one because it illustrates the difference between the way a case looks on paper and the way it presents in the courtroom. Haley was in an accident that the defendant unquestionably caused. She testified that the symptoms started immediately after the accident, sought medical treatment within a few days, was given a diagnosis, and has continually sought treatment over the succeeding years. There are objective diagnostic findings. The defense put forth incompetent experts. The plaintiffs got the testimony of treating physicians (rare), and had experts who were able to testify as to damages.
Yet the jury only awarded a fraction of the damages the Plaintiff asked for, and didn't award anything for pain and suffering. I looked Haley up, and she is a somewhat large young woman. I'm guessing she presented on the stand as overly dramatic, and that the jury didn't believe the damage evidence that she played sports in high school and worked out regularly and was depressed that she couldn't do these things anymore. There was also the testimony that suggests it was a relatively minor collision and not of the type where one would expect serious ongoing medical problems. They probably felt like since she wasn't at fault and obviously experienced some kind of injury she should get some money for the aggravation, but not enough to really mean anything, and they just skipped the pain and suffering part because, as the opinion notes, the jury doesn't have to award pain and suffering for the typical kinds of aggravation everyone experiences. In other words, girl gets in minor car crash, claims major injuries, okay, the other person was liable, but seriously? Except they don't know how to properly express this on the jury form and they end up giving the Plaintiff another bite at the apple. If they had awarded $12,000 in future expenses and $4,000 in pain and suffering then the verdict would be much harder to challenge.
I'm pretty defensive of the legal system here, because it usually works better than people give it credit for, but I'm not so in the bag for it that I don't realize that a system run by lawyers and judges gets us a system that works well for lawyers and judges. We spend so much time immersed in this stuff that it's easy to forget that people out in the real world don't have a clue about any of this and will do things that make sense to them but not to the court, which is a big problem when we're relying on them to make important decisions. I wouldn't have a problem with instructions that explained to the jury that yes, this can be second guessed by a court, and here are the reasons a court will second guess it. Saying someone suffered injuries resulting in thousands of dollars in medical treatment but didn't experience any pain and suffering beyond what is comparable to being sore for a few days doesn't make sense, and a court won't let it stand. Saying that the defendant didn't cause the plaintiff's injury but the defendant did bad stuff so they should pay anyway doesn't make sense, and a court won't let it stand. We fight over these jury instructions so much that we end up with something that might not make sense.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
It's not so much about whether Nazi ideas are held by a significant number of Republicans/conservatives, but whether there is a popular perception that they are. A lot of people on here seem to think that the Democratic Party is hostile to men, or white men, or whatever. It's a reasonable conclusion to come to if you listen to certain voices that are amplified by people looking to influence your opinion, but if you take an objective look at the party itself, it's absurd. The party chairman is a white guy. The most recent president was a white guy. All across the country, at all levels of government, there are white guys in elected positions as Democrats, and there are plenty more who were nominated by the party and lost.
In 2022, when Pat Toomey's seat opened up, there were four options for the Democrats. Val Arkoosh was a doctor who showed some early promise but withdrew before the primaries. Malcolm Kenyatta was a black, gay, state legislator from Philadelphia who was able to wrangle some early endorsements and seemed like the favorite son of the party. But when Conor Lamb entered the race, practically everyone who mattered in the party threw their support behind him, aside from the state party and Governor Wolf, both of whom declined to endorse any candidate. Lamb is about as sterotypical upper middle class white guy as it gets. Hell, just being an attorney from Mt. Lebanon signals as much to anyone from Pittsburgh. Lamb eventually lost the nomination, though, to a non-stereotypical white guy with a higher public profile.
These do not come off as the actions of a party that is hostile to white men. But there's a perception nonetheless that it is, and there's certainly a brand of lefty that is hostile to white men, and, as I've been saying for years, the influence of this kind of person among normie Democrats is wildly overstated by people trying to portray the party as a caricature for political purposes. And it's a problem for Democrats, and while I won't go as far as saying that it has cost them elections, it is certainly plausible to think so. If people get the impression that the Republican Party is insufficiently condemnatory of white nationalists, or Nazi sympathizers, or people who make racist jokes in private, or whoever, then it could come back to bite them in the ass regardless of whether these people make up a significant number of registered voters or elected officials.
This is why people like Stefniak are quick to condemn these people and call for their resignations. If you recall Stefniak was gunning for a UN Ambassadorship, only to have her nomination pulled by Trump. She's in a nominally safe seat, but Trump had recently had to travel to Florida to after the seat vacated by Mike Walz was in danger of being lost to a Democrat, a seat Walz had carried by 30 points. the GOP underperforms when Trump isn't on the ballot, and if Trump's popularity declines it could spell trouble in 2026. Probably not enough trouble for Stefniak to lose her seat, but an opponent being able to roast her for ignoring people from her district in party-affiliated offices making these kinds of remarks in a semi-official forum then it could be enough to tip things over the edge. It's at least enough of a concern that Trump was unwilling to risk a special election.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It's even worse than that, because at least Yahoo and Microsoft had viable business plans and are still around years later. ChatGTP and other AI-only companies are more similar to Pets.com than the boosters want to realize. The news stories about the site's downfall always focused on the amount they spent on advertising, but they were selling the stuff they bought for less than what they paid for it, plus free shipping, in a bid to corner the market. ChatGTP is even worse because 97% of the users aren't paying anything, there is no advertising on the platform (and banner ads aren't going to cut it), and the 3% who do pay are likely power users who get more than their money's worth. So it's like if Pets.com gave 97% of their stuff away for free, sold the remaining 3% at a discount, and justified it by assuming that online shopping would be revolutionary and everyone would buy everything online. They were essentially right, they just went about it the wrong way to keep the spigot flowing. Add in spending large sums on infrastructure (i.e. warehouses vs. data centers) and the parallels are all too clear.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
MY brother is unpretentious and got into Wallace after I showed him the essay about the cruise ship that we both quote relentlessly. On year at the beach he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to read Wallace. He not only finished it, he's reread it several times. I think part of it is that none of his friends even know who Wallace is so he came into it as a book written by a writer he found funny (we both have an excessively dry sense of humor) and not as something he felt obligated to read. I started it years ago but with my own knowledge of the book's import I found it impossible to continue, even though my brother insists that it's right up my alley.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I think he was referring to a system they have in places like Sweden, where if you're a normal W-2 employee the government would look at your W-2 income and take the standard deductions and do all the stuff that they will correct anyway if you did it differently and didn't get the maximum refund. The first time you claim a child they could keep track of the age and take the deduction every year until 18. If you wanted to take more deductions than they were offering, then you'd file your own return. But most people wouldn't have the need to do that. The predatory thing comes with H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt opening up places in the 'hood where they'll offer to do poor people's taxes so they can charge a percentage of the EITC they recover.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
To attempt an actual answer, I think it's because cycling is an individual sport with clear rules and an adjudicative body. Armstrong not only broke the rules, but took active measures to conceal his rulebreaking. And there was no question about what he did. Contrast this with the MLB, where no one is discussing whether or not the wins were legitimate, rather whether the records should have an asterisk. And the only case where anyone is really talking about that is with respect to the Barry Bonds home run records, which already have their own problems. The Aaron record is the most defensible one to revert back to, but the McGwire one can't be done because he was juicing too, which takes us back to Maris, who had his own asterisk discussion because he had a longer season to work with than Babe Ruth did. Plus there's the issue that if you officially strip Bonds and others of home runs for record purposes, then shouldn't you make them not count for games, either? It gets complicated real fast.
And add to that the much thinner evidence that Bonds was juicing. It's one of those things where people who were sort of paying attention to the scandal at the time are aware of the broad strokes, but no one remembers the actual evidence. Bonds never admitted doing anything illegal, and it basically comes down to a crooked doctor and that his head got bigger (which is an effect of HGH, which wasn't banned at the time). It isn't a 1–1 comparison but they do this all the time in auto racing for cars that don't pass post-race inspection. A few years back they disqualified the winner and the runner up of the Pocono race because they had an illegal piece of tape on the front of their cars. One can make the argument that this had real-world implications rather than merely historical ones because they lost the points they would have earned for the season and got zeroes instead, but that seems to be more severe than not being recognized on Wikipedia (which they aren't). And for what it's worth, the official NCAA coaching wins lists don't include wins that were stripped by the NCAA. For the 2004 USC team, it merely gives an asterisk, but that's understandable since the BCS wasn't run by the NCAA and the NCAA does not award a championship.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I'm not sure how to tell you this, and I'm not an architect, but I don't see how the layout you're under contract for makes sense. My admittedly amateur eye sees several problems that suggest to me that there's a reason you don't see house layouts like this:
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Starting with the front door, it's path is in conflict with the door to the utility room, since the utility room door swings outwards.
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The reason it swings outwards is because the layout of the utility room doesn't make sense. There isn't enough depth to store the washer and dryer without them sticking out into the entry path from the door. And assuming you're putting the water heater, furnace, and panel box in here, plus possibly a stationary tub, the room isn't long enough to put them far enough back to keep them out of the immediate ingress path.
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The living room-as-central-hall concept will reduce the usable space by half. My house was built in 1945 and the upstairs hallway is 36" wide, and it's narrow; newer homes have 48" hallways. I'd say three feet is the minimum clearance you'll need around the doors to have adequate movement without it being cramped. Since you have doors on both sides of the room, nearly half of the total width needs to be kept clear for ingress and egress through the area.
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The upshot of the above is that there will be very little room for furniture. The couch will have to be practically in the middle of the room. I think I see how you have a plan to mount the TV on the wall between two doors. With this TV location, you'll have to get a very small "apartment sofa" dead center in the room, and you might have room for a small end table or another chair on the wall next to the door. And that's it. That also means that the highest traffic area of the house will be directly between the couch and the television.
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Another issue with having a central hall is that the private areas of the house are exposed to the living area. If you're entertaining people will be looking in bedrooms, and will be going to the bathroom with nothing but an inch and a half of birch between them and the party.
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Why the double doors in the bathrooms? They have conflicting swing paths and seem unnecessary. Make the master bath en suite and the spare open up to the house.
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What do you need two bathrooms for? And two large bathrooms at that; a typical size for a full bath in a small house is 8' × 5'. I don't know why you'd build a house with an 800 ft² footprint and waste space on two bathrooms.
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Why no basement? I know they're more expensive, but if I understand correctly you're in the Philly/NJ area, which isn't exactly the South. Here in Pittsburgh the frost line is at 36" and while I imagine it's less over there, it couldn't be that much less. Building on a slab means sinking a footer at 36" and then building up frost walls, which is still ultimately less expensive but doesn't usually make sense considering that a basement gives you a lot of extra space. Slabs are also more difficult to heat. The only time people build on slabs around here is if there's some special consideration like they're building on an old industrial site, there are mine subsidence issues, or they're in the mountains where there's shallow bedrock. The only house I saw that was build on a slab for no reason had a lot of other puzzling decisions made by the guy who built it, who I knew and was surprised he'd build a house like that.
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Not as big a deal, but the lack of a rear door seems concerning.
If you want to look at efficient houses, look at a typical ranch or split-entry layout. They're all practically mirror images but when they were building tract houses in the '50s and 60's the builders wanted to maximize usable space while still making the house livable.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Imagine you're planning a vacation. Your dream vacation is Hawaii; your second choice is Myrtle Beach, but that would only be about half as fun. So you call a travel agent, and find out that you unfortunately don't have enough money for a flight to Hawaii. On the other hand, you could drive to Myrtle Beach, which wouldn't be nearly as expensive. Now suppose the travel agent calls you back and offers you the following proposition: "You can't afford to fly to Hawaii, but I've found a reduced rate ticket that will get you 95% of the way there for only 20% of the full price. Granted, it doesn't quite get you to Hawaii, but isn't getting 95% of your dream vacation better than settling for Myrtle Beach, which is only worth half?"
This is obviously nuts, because getting 95% of the way to Hawaii puts you somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's pretty obvious that if you can't get all the way to Hawaii then you're better off going somewhere else entirely. 80%, or 90%, or whatever of a marketable product is no product at all. 80% autonomous cars are regular cars with fancy cruise control (which is itself only used a small percentage of the time), and 80% of whatever AI is aiming for is fancy, expensive, inefficient Google. And saying you're 80% of the way there is more or less meaningless when it comes to technology investment. It's a vague term that has no bearing on actual numbers; it certainly doesn't mean that you're 80% of the way there time-wise or that you've spent 80% of what's necessary to get to 100%, just as the last 5% of the way to Hawaii costs four times as much as the first 95%.
In 2020, The Information estimated that the AV industry had spent $16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare. OpenAI's recent projections for 2025 predict $7.8 billion in operating losses and a $13.5 billion net loss. One company in one year manages to spend half the money that the entire AV industry spent in a decade. And incidentally, the amount of money spent on AV research has actually gone up since then, yet you admit yourself that the improvements haven't exactly been dramatic.
AI companies want to spend another trillion or so in the next five years. Will it get them to that magic 100% mark where they can actually sell something for a profit? Nobody knows, but if it can't, I'm willing to guess that the industry's proposed solution will be to spend more money. The point I'm trying to make is that the amount of money they want to spend simply does not exist, and even if it did spending it is not justifiable to someone who eventually expects to turn a profit. If the amount being spent were on par with AVs I'd be more optimistic, but it's exponentially larger. There's going to be a point where the funding isn't going to be there, VC firms are going to have to eat their losses, and there will be a bear market in tech investment where AI is practically a dirty word. This isn't like AVs where the amount of money involved is small enough that companies can quietly make small gains that take years rather than months; it's significantly worse.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
You're ignoring the fact that, according to Neilsen, about 20% of people in the US rely on OTA TV to receive local stations, myself included, and that number is in excess of 30% in some markets. This is up from 2008, when only 15% of households relied on antenna broadcasts. In 2008 on-demand and internet-based video services didn't really exist, and cable-television was bigger. Also in 2008, we were freeing up a part of the spectrum by making TV stations switch to digital transmission. This theoretically affected even fewer households, as nothing needed to be done unless your TV was several years old, but the changeover was delayed by six months, and the change was only accomplished by the government handing out coupons for free converter boxes. Telling 20% of the country that they have to pay for television or give it up is a nonstarter.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
They're slower than most traffic because they always do the speed limit and don't roll stop signs. They also tend to reroute to avoid more difficult left turns, though this isn't as much of an issue as it was a few years ago. I'm not saying these are necessarily bad things (there are good reasons for strictly adhering to the law), but it's still going to be somewhat slower than a human driver.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I think its an effort thing. Dem mayors instruct their police to not even try to stop rampant arson and not to bother investigating afterwards, and on the off chance they do then the Dem DA doesn't prosecute it.
But is it? The idea that the 2020 riot crimes were under-prosecuted is an article of faith on the right, but I haven't seen any real evidence that this is the case. The Major Cities Chiefs Association compiled a comprehensive report about the law enforcement response to civil unrest in 68 major cities between May 25 and July 31, 2020. During that time period, they recorded 2,385 looting incidents, 624 arsons, 97 burned police cars, and 2,037 police officers injured. They also recorded 2,735 felony arrests. The report isn't detailed enough to break down the number of individual felonies reported, but the 5,143 incidents named above is as good a guide as any (it goes without saying that looting incidents could have had more than one perpetrator, but this is balanced by the fact that the same people may have been involved in multiple incidents, and that some of the police injuries weren't due to assault by protestors). With that caveat, we get a rough estimate of a 53% clearance rate for riot-related felonies.
To put that in the proper context, nationwide in 2019 arson had a clearance rate of 23.9%, and burglary had a clearance rate of 14.1%. Even if my estimate is inflated, and I admit that it probably is, it's still a long ways away from suggesting that these crimes were significantly under-investigated; if that were the case, I would expect the totals to be substantially lower than the averages. Again, I admit that this data isn't ideal but... do you have any other data? With how much this has been repeated I'd expect something, at some point, coming out to back this up, but there's nothing. No studies, no disgruntled chiefs of police saying they were hamstrung by liberal prosecutors, no pardons from governors, nothing. On the other hand, it doesn't take long to find contemporaneous quotes from mayors affirming the right to peaceful protest while reminding people that lawbreakers will be prosecuted, or imposing curfews that they didn't have to impose, or bulletins from local police asking for the public's help in identifying rioters.
The source of this myth seems to come from media reports showing that 90% of the protestors were arrested had the charges dismissed. But this is accepted as a blanket fact without any context: These dismissals weren't for felonies or serious misdemeanors, but for summary offenses like disorderly conduct, loitering, and failure to disperse. The arrests themselves weren't made in response to any investigation, but as crowd-control techniques for when they felt things were getting a bit too rowdy. But crimes have elements that prosecutors must meet, and when police aren't making arrests with an eye towards prosecution, their cases aren't prosecutable. If you haven't personally witnessed a protest like this, the process generally goes as follows: The police declare a gathering illegal. A dispersal order is given. Whoever doesn't disperse is arrested by officers on the scene and loaded into paddy wagons. The officers who made the arrest stay behind, and the arrestees are booked by yet another officer. They're charged and released.
If you want to actually prosecute a case like this, you run into problems at the preliminary hearing. There's no police report. You can't produce the arresting officer as a witness; hell, you probably can't even identify the arresting officer for a given defendant. People arrested in different locations might be comingled at the precinct, so you can't even say where the guy was arrested. And even if by some grace of God you do have this, while the case gets easier, it doesn't get easier by much. First you have to establish that the protest was illegal, which may be the case if a road is being blocked, but is a tough row to hoe if it was a permitted protest that the police got uneasy about and hadn't yet seen any violence. Then you have to prove that a dispersal order was given in a manner such that the individual defendant would have heard it, which is tougher than it seems in a loud area with people moving around. But the real problem comes when you have to show that the defendant was given a reasonable opportunity to leave. The typical tactic used to facilitate mass arrests was to form police cordons around the perimeter to prevent the crowd from fanning out, then closing in to make arrests. A lawful protestor is thus presented with the dilemma of being told to disperse by police while simultaneously being prevented from leaving the area. And that's if you're lucky enough to have a real crime to charge. Most of these arrests were for charges like disorderly conduct and loitering whose elements are vague and are dependent on detailed police testimony showing that the defendant actually met some reasonable definition of disorderly and wasn't just arrested because the cop didn't like him.
But it rarely ever gets that far, because the cases have almost zero evidence, the prosecutors know this, and they dismiss the cases before they ever get in front of a judge. The one exception was Detroit, where the mayor, a former prosecutor, decided to charge all of the minor offenses that amounted to being in the wrong place. The poor assistant sent to present the cases to the judge had to suffer the humiliation of having dozens of them dismissed immediately after he admitted that he couldn't produce any evidence whatsoever. The DA's office dropped the remaining cases shortly thereafter.
Compare that to the Capitol riot, where everyone who merely entered that building and wasn't on a short list of people was guilty of unauthorized entry of a government facility, a misdemeanor carrying a penalty of up to a year in jail. There were thousands of hours of video posted to the internet within the next few days, enough in total that investigators could more or less track everyone's entire route through the building. People were bragging about their crimes on social media, posting selfies of themselves inside. And there was no shortage of people calling in to provide identification of people they recognized. Prosecutors had more evidence than they could dream of, and there was broad bipartisan consensus that the perpetrators should be prosecuted. Remember, this investigation started immediately after the incident, while Trump was still president, and it wasn't until months later until Republicans gradually came to the conclusion that it wasn't a big deal. Trump had weeks to issue pardons to anyone involved but he didn't. Was Biden supposed to call of his dogs in the middle of the investigation because Republicans suddenly decided it was better politics to let the people off?
One final thing—when people try to compare cases and show that person x got so much time for a felony while person y got so much time for "just entering a building" with the implication that the two sentences are disproportionate, they often don't take an important factor into account: Plea bargains. The people in the Capitol riot who merely entered and did nothing but walk around generally were able to enter pleas that avoided jail, and the ones facing felony obstruction charges got away with minimal jail time. But the Capitol riot had a disproportionate number of defendants who refused to take plea deals when the evidence against them was overwhelming, and went on to put forth horrible defenses that did nothing but piss off the judge. The argument can be made that this is unfair, and there shouldn't be a penalty for making the state prove their case. I can agree to a certain extent, but this misframes what is going on. They aren't getting penalized for going to trial, they're getting a light sentence for not going to trial. The alternative is that no one would be offered a reduced sentence.
Furthermore, the law grants a degree of lenience to people who appear to be remorseful for their crimes and take responsibility for their actions. Is this something we want to encourage or discourage? Should a first-time offender who admits he made a mistake, apologizes to the victim, and appears to have a genuine desire for self-improvement get a similar sentence to a defendant who continues to insist he did nothing wrong even after the jury says otherwise? These are things we can disagree about, or discuss, but wherever you land, that's the system that we have now. It doesn't matter whether you're in a Democratic area or a Republican area, people who take deals and show remorse will get lighter sentences than those who don't.
What irritates me the most about these arguments regarding January 6 is that they're almost without exception put forth by the kind of people who don't think that the criminal justice system is harsh enough. They talk about how police are hamstrung by liberal city governments, about how liberal prosecutors aren't aggressive enough, about how bleeding heart prison reformers don't understand that jail isn't supposed to be fun. But the minute they're on the receiving end of the system as it normally operates, injustice is everywhere. Marjorie Taylor-Greene is suddenly concerned about prison conditions. The minutia of overcharging becomes an issue. They seem to forget that in these liberal cities police make arrests every day and courts hand down sentences every day and that prosecutors don't just let minorities off the hook because they feel sorry for black people. One would have thought that when their own side fucked up it would have maybe given them some perspective. But no, they make excuses for why they shouldn't be punished before going back to whinging about how the cops aren't harsh enough.
A decade ago everyone was saying more or less the same thing about autonomous vehicles, yet a true AV seems further away now than it did then. Sure, progress has been made, but the most we have to show for it is incredibly slow robotaxis operating in geofenced areas within a few select cities that don't have weather, which taxis are under constant monitoring from central command. As far as consumer products are concerned, the best we have is the Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, which allows you to take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road while traveling on mapped highways during daylight when there is no rain or snow in traffic 40 mph or below. In other words, nowhere outside of urban freeways during rush hour. I'm not trying to knock technological advances, but there's no realistic timeline on when I'll be able to buy a car that will take me practically anywhere my current car will and allow me to zone out on the way, or be drunk.
And that's for a technology that has paying customers, an obvious use case, and has spent significantly less money in the past 15 years than the AI industry has spent in the last 5. A half trillion dollars later and a rep from the largest (or at least most prominent) AI company can't even tell customers what they're supposed to be using the product for, just that they need to be using it more. They can't provide any technical assistance, other than that they should be doing it better, and the next update will totally solve the problem, whatever that is (something tells me that they would have said the same thing before the last update). And this is for one of the few companies that's actually paying for it. I used to subscribe to specialized, expensive legal software for my firm ($1,000/year), and the sales rep was an expert. She (and her competitors) offered an in-depth demo at which they were able to answer all of my questions, and after I bought in I could call at any time and get help. How long do you think it will be before @dukeleto's boss realized that all this is doing is costing the company money and cancels the subscription?
But that's neither here nor there; if this were normal technology like AVs I'd be more optimistic about the industry plodding along gradually. The bigger problem is that we're talking about an industry that's spent 500 billion on a product that doesn't sell, and I've read various places that the amount of planned spending the next few years is in the trillions. By comparison, the year with the highest AV investment was 2021, with somewhere around 13 billion. OpenAI alone plans to spend more than that on training next year, after spending 9 billion this year.
The point I'm making is that the amount of money necessary to keep this train going simply doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist without them convincing people to actually pay for their product. ChatGTP has about a 3% conversion rate. "Well," the optimists say, the real money is in enterprise sales and software integration. Well, Microsoft has a similar 3% conversion rate for its Copilot add-on. This is Microsoft we're talking about, a company so good at selling its products that they're the industry standard in both business and home use, present in hundreds of millions of computers worldwide. And Spotify had a conversion rate 8 times higher its first year in the US.
So what happens after the bubble pops? I don't want to speculate on how it will unfold because I can imagine any number of scenarios, but I'm pretty sure about a couple things. First is that free access to LLMs will either go away entirely or be severely limited. Whoever is left in the business isn't going to be able to afford to lose money on every query. More dramatically, though, I don't think R&D can plod along gradually like it did with AVs; it's just too expensive. When training a new model costs billions, it's not something you can throw money at from the R&D budget. And in the wake of the bubble bursting, even the idea of it might turn people off. I may be wrong insofar as there may be a future for it similar to AVs, but even then, it's a far cry from what we were promised.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I don't know what gives you the idea that an open door would not qualify. The statute makes no mention of doors, and only requires that you know that you're not supposed to be in there. If I walk down the street and see a house with an open door and I just walk in I'd be guilty of criminal trespass. If I opened a closed door a breaking would have occurred and the offense would be upgraded. The statute is specifically written to cover cases involving open doors.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
Margaret Aislinn Channon, a 26-year-old Tacoma resident was sentenced to five years in prison in March 2022. She was charged with five counts of arson after setting five Seattle police cars on fire during a protest on May 30, 2020. Upon her sentencing, then U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said that the right to protest and call out injustice is one of the dearest and most important rights we enjoy in the United States: "But Ms. Channon’s conduct was itself an attack on democracy. She used the cover of lawful protests to carry out dangerous and destructive acts, risking the safety of everyone around her and undermining the important messages voiced by others.”
Devinare Antwan Parker, 31, was sentenced to two years in prison in June 2023 for bringing a homemade firearm to a protest in Seattle on May 31, 2020. The charge was “unlawful possession of a destructive device.” Parker threatened to kill police at the time, and was arrested after he threw a can of beer at a police officer's face.
Isaiah Thomas Willoughby was arrested for attempting to set fire to a wall of the East Precinct in June 2020. Willoughby reportedly piled up debris next to the police station, soaked it in gasoline, and set it on fire. People nearby put it out. Willoughby was sentenced to two years in prison.
The last defendant facing federal charges for crimes committed during the racial justice protests of 2020 in Seattle was sentenced on Wednesday to just over three years in prison. Justin Moore, 35 of Renton, previously pleaded guilty to possessing destructive devices. On Sept. 7, 2020, Moore brought 12 Molotov cocktails made from beer bottles and gasoline to the Seattle Police Officers Guild headquarters during a protest. Surveillance video shows a hooded and masked Moore lugging the explosives outside the headquarters, which was the target of numerous attacks during the 2020 protests.
Jacob Greenburg, 19, the stepson of former Kirkland State Rep. Laura Ruderman, was sentenced to five years in prison, in line with what prosecutors recommended. Greenburg was charged with first-degree assault, first-degree attempted arson and first-degree reckless burning.
A federal judge on Friday sentenced Samuel Elliott Frey, 20, of Brooklyn Park, Minn., to more than two years in federal prison for setting fire to a health food store during the riots that followed the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
A Minneapolis man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for starting a fire inside Target headquarters during a riot in August 2020, U.S. Attorney Andrew M. Luger announced Wednesday. Leroy Lemonte Perry Williams, 37, was convicted on one count of arson for the incident in October last year.
Just this month, a man was sentenced to four years behind bars and ordered to pay what his attorney said is likely to exceed $1.5 million in restitution after pleading guilty to inciting a riot last spring in Champaign, Illinois. Shamar Betts, who was 19 at the time, posted a flyer on Facebook on May 31, 2020, that said “RIOT @ MarketPlace Mall” at 3 p.m. and instructed people to bring “friends & family, posters, bricks, bookbags etc.” He participated in the looting, went live on Facebook during the riot and bragged about starting it, authorities said. More than 70 stores were looted, and the riot caused $1.8 million in damage, prosecutors said.
Victor Devon Edwards, 32, was given his sentence of over eight years in prison followed by two years of supervised release by U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz, after Edwards was convicted by a jury in August on one count each of rioting and arson.
I can keep going if you really want me to—there were over 100 felony convictions in Minneapolis alone—but I think you get the point. Hell, Los Angeles had a special task force set up to identify people who committed crimes in the riots.
J6ers got felonies simply for walking through an open door.
You make it sound like this is some unusual gross injustice. But if you look at the Pennsylvania laws for Criminal Trespass:
(a) Buildings and occupied structures.--
(1) A person commits an offense if, knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so, he:
(i) enters, gains entry by subterfuge or surreptitiously remains in any building or occupied structure or separately secured or occupied portion thereof; or
(ii) breaks into any building or occupied structure or separately secured or occupied portion thereof.
(2) An offense under paragraph (1)(i) is a felony of the third degree, and an offense under paragraph (1)(ii) is a felony of the second degree.
Of course, DC is not Pennsylvania, and their comparable statute is only a misdemeanor, but that's what the people who merely entered were charged with. The ones who were charged with felony Obstructing counts had some kind of aggravating circumstances going against them, like remaining in the building after specifically being told to leave or engaging in behavior that delayed the police attempts to get everyone out. And even then, I don't see how it's relevant to the point that it justifies pardons, since those convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court. And I still don't see how that justifies pardoning people who committed more serious crimes. If this is really just a tit for tat response to partisan pressures, then Trump should also pardon those I listed above who were convicted of Federal crimes, no?
re-arrest every single one of them on new charges and throw the book at them. Get a warrant and crawl through every device and account they they have, and search all their belongings for any antifa-related items.
And charge them with what, exactly? Having antifa-related items? In the case of Jan 6, entering an open door in that case was clearly a crime, and the people charged clearly committed it. The perpetrators were arrested on the basis of actual evidence, and the investigators were willing to present that evidence in court They had them dead to rights, and the smart ones took pleas. A lot of them were incredibly stupid, though, making inane arguments that they seriously thought the building was open to the public, or sovereign citizen bullshit. The George Floyd protestors who were arrested and charged with misdemeanor or summary disorderly conduct, failure to disperse, loitering, or similar offenses were arrested in public areas where it isn't illegal to be. Prosecutors would have to show, for instance, that the assembly was illegal (which requires them to prove a risk of unlawful conduct), that a dispersal order was issued, that the person charged would have heard the dispersal order, and that the person was given a reasonable opportunity to leave.
The problem with the 2020 arrests was that most of them weren't made in strict accordance with the law, but were mass arrests used as a crowd control tactic. If you've never been involved in a protest and seen this before, and officer or officers will make the arrests and load everyone into a paddy wagon, staying behind to continue to work crowd control. Once everyone arrives at the station they are all charged with some low-level misdemeanor and released after a few hours. Police generally didn't prosecute these cases because they weren't prosecutable. The once exception was Detroit, whose mayor, Mike Duggan, was a former prosecutor dedicated to making an example (though it should be noted that the rioting in Detroit was limited to a couple broken windows on police cruisers and some objects being thrown). I pity the poor ADA who had to tell the judge that he couldn't produce bodycam footage, or a police report, or even the name of the arresting officer. He had to endure this humiliation dozens of times in a row and watch the cases get dismissed for lack of evidence until the DA got the point and dismissed the remaining cases.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
You are aware that the DNC chair is a white man and 5 of the 11 board seats are also men, 7 of 13 if you include the ranking House and Senate leaders who serve on the board? You are also aware that local Democratic committees are composed of 1 man and 1 woman per precinct by rule? And I don't expect you to be aware of this, but in Allegheny County at least, the local board is mostly straight, white men. Are you also aware that these positions are elected and there are usually plenty of vacancies due to lack of interest and unwillingness to actually put the work in, and that it's not that hard to get on the ballot? Do you really think that men are turning away from the Democratic Party because they can't get work with them?
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest. I'm serious. The crucial mistake of the J6 protestors is that they were all incredibly stupid. The BLM rioters at least had the sense to operate primarily at night, conceal their identities, and choose locations that weren't guaranteed to be under God-level surveillance. Not that it mattered since they took videos of themselves and posted them to social media. The reason there weren't as many arrests during 2020 as you think there should have been is because Priority #1 is ending the riot, not investigating and making arrests for individual crimes. The same priorities prevailed on January 6, with very few people being arrested at the scene and the vast majority being identified and arrested later. Unless the evidence exists that allows you to identify criminals, you can't arrest them. You act as though there are tens of thousands of people out there who the police know committed crimes but who aren't being arrested for political reasons.
I will grant that a lot of people who were arrested for more minor crimes like failure to disperse had the charges dropped without incident. However, you have to consider the context of what was going on in 2020: The courts were operating under severe restrictions due to COVID. The normal criminal dockets were backed up; it wasn't feasible to prosecute hundreds of people on charges that would result in small fines when they were already having trouble moving felonies through. But the people who caused damage and were caught generally were prosecuted.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
How much research did you do? On Saturday he makes his famous "many sides" comment. On Monday he releases the prepared statement you linked to. On Tuesday he doubles down on what he said Saturday:
What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?
You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists; the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
You also had some very fine people on both sides
Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. This week, it is Robert E. Lee. And I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you have to ask yourself, where does it stop?
As @Rosencrantz2 points out, you can cherry pick a few sentences out of each incident to make it sound like he's offering nothing but condemnation, but I specifically said that he can't help using these events as opportunities to dunk on his opponents. His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it. He says the left is just as bad, if not worse. And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
There's a saying, more of a cliche, about being the change you want to see. Given that Donald Trump basically is the Republican Party at this point, and has been for some time, I don't see any evidence of anyone desiring any change or even indicating that they want a change, provided it isn't just that the other side has to do the changing. Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one. I'm not interested in which side has more total incidents or who started it or any of that, because it honestly doesn't matter at this point. We can go all the way back to Trump's entry into politics in 2015 and see nothing but excuses, equivocation, or using tragic events as an opportunity to dunk on his political opponents. Let's take a look at some of the biggies that have transpired in that time:
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Dylann Roof: Trump wasn't really in a position where he'd be required to say anything at the time of the incident, as it preceded his entry into politics, but he later criticized the media for not blaming Obama for the shooting. The context of that remark was somewhat complicated, but it's nonetheless impossible to believe any context where Obama could have credibly been blamed for the Roof incident.
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Cesar Sayok: See above. A pro-Trump militant mails pipe bombs to various Democratic leaders. Trump's immediate concern is that the media is unfairly blaming him for inspiring the incident. Whether or not that was fair, there didn't seem to be much concern from Trump or any other Republican that somebody was mailing pipe bombs for political reasons.
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The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot: Immediately following the arrests, Trump's response was to suggest that she should be in jail anyway due to her COVID policies. In the course of the prosecution it would later come to light that the perpetrators had an entrapment defense that wasn't entirely ridiculous, though it was ultimately unsuccessful, and various people on the right latched on to this to make them look like political prisoners. This ignores the fact that Trump made his comments long before anyone knew all the details.
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Paul Pelosi Attack: Trump wasn't in office then, but his response was to make jokes about it on the campaign trail. Then a completely baseless theory developed among conservatives who were sure that the guy was a male prostitute in a relationship with Pelosi. Charlie Kirk said that a true patriot needed to come along and bail the guy out. Even the Republicans who offered support to the Pelosis did nothing to attempt to diffuse the rumors.
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Charlottesville: The most famous of Trump's equivocations, endlessly defended among his supporters. The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence. It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does. Had he simply disavowed white supremacy and violence that would have been the end of it, but he had to use the tragedy as an opportunity to take a dig at his political opponents.
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Minnesota Lawmaker Shootings: This is probably the most he ever did in that his office issued a written statement condemning the attacks. But when he actually got in front of a microphone he couldn't resist the opportunity to dunk on Tim Walz.
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Shapiro Arson: Probably his best response so far, in that he was completely silent about it, except for a private call with Shapiro several days after the incident.
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January 6: The Biggie. This topic has been litigated to death on here and I'm not about to relitigate it. Hundreds of people break into the Capitol building, threatening the vice president and various other politicians, in order to overturn the results of a presidential election. Even while they're still in the building, Trump can't address the nation without telling them he loves them. Initial Republican condemnation turns to justification and excuse making: Most of them just trespassed, they weren't carrying guns, the Democrats didn't do a good job of stopping the 2020 protests (never mind Trump was president), Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican nationalists 30-years later, the election really was stolen and they were all patriots, etc.
If that's where things ended then I could just lump this in with the above, but it went further. As the years past the plight of the poor insurrectionists became a cause celebre on the right, culminating in the pardons of everyone involve. Doesn't matter if they actually caused property damage. Doesn't matter if they assaulted cops. Doesn't matter if they planned things in advance. It was all a big liberal hoax to take political prisoners. It was at this point that the GOP completely abandoned any pretext of being a law and order party insofar as the law applies equally to everyone. Instead they used the perceived bad behavior of their political opponents as a license to condone violence that supports their own political ends.
All of the above is why I find it hard to take the crocodile tears and phony-baloney moralizing following the Kirk shooting seriously. Even when Fox News tried to give Trump an opportunity to turn down the temperature, he rebuked them, insinuating that the ends justified the means; right-wing extremists were okay because they at least wanted the same things he did, while it's the left that's the real problem. When asked about mending the political divide he said he wasn't interested. He said at Kirk's funeral that he disagreed with Kirk in that he hated his opponents and wanted them destroyed.
So when someone says that Jay Jones's private text messages from three years ago should be politically disqualifying I can agree in an abstract sense that they probably should be. But how many things has Trump said that would have traditionally disqualified a presidential candidate? I'm not even going to list them, because on the one hand it would take forever, but more importantly, I'm sure I'd get a bunch of people arguing how it really isn't that bad. Hell, two thirds of Trump's appeal is that he "tells it like it is" without any regard for political correctness. Let's be honest, if text messages had come out wherein Trump said something similar about a Democratic politician in the weeks preceding the election, approximately five people nationwide would change their votes to Harris on that basis. I don't believe for a second that this is some kind of red line that you simply won't allow any politician to cross.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
The thing no one seems to be talking about with respect to AI is how the underlying economics of it all are so mind-numbingly bad that a crash is inevitable. I have no idea when this crash is going to happen, but if I had to fathom a guess it will be some time within the next five years. We're talking about a technology that has already burned at least half a trillion dollars and has plans to burn another half trillion with no model for profitability in sight. There's only so long that the flow of venture capital will keep coming before the investors start expecting some kind of return. Add in the fact that Nvidia currently represents about 8% of the total value of the S&P 500 based on sales of graphics cards to a single, unprofitable company, and the economic picture looks even more dire.
I think that the underlying problem is that they're trying to run an enshittification model on an industry where the path has typically been the exact opposite. Look at computers themselves. When computers were first invented, they were limited to institutional uses by governments and large universities, and were subsidized through R&D budgets that weren't relying on profitability, i.e. as a present expense rather than a credit against future earnings. Then large corporations started using them. When personal computers were developed in the late 1970s, they were mostly used by businesses, and in the consumer market they were expensive machines for the tech-horny. As costs came down, more and more households began using them, and by the time they became ubiquitous at the end of the 20th century it had been 50 years since their invention, and they still weren't exactly cheap.
Now imagine an alternate timeline where IBM decides in the 1950s to build several large computers in cities all across the country, enough that they can let every Tom, Dick, and Harry run whatever programs they want for free, all the way down to middle schoolers doing their math homework, with minimal wait time. And of course they're offering on-site programmers so that you don't actually need to know anything about computers to be able to take advantage of them, and they're convinced that after doing this for years people will be so enamored that they'll eventually start paying for the privilege. You'd have been laughed out of the board room for making such a suggestion, yet this is roughly the state of the AI business model.
AI cheerleaders will point to other tech companies that lost tons of money in their early years, only to later become behemoths. Uber is often cited as an example, as they spent more than a decade losing money before becoming profitable. But there are two big differences with Uber. The first is that they were actually responding to a market need. Outside of a select few cities like New York and Las Vegas, taxi service in America was at best, inconvenient, and at worst, nonexistent. They successfully discovered an unmet demand and developed a service to fill that demand. No one was ever speculating on what Uber would be used for they way they are with AI, and from their launch they provided the exact service people expected that they would provide. The second, more important reason, is that Uber never gave away their service for free. Okay, maybe there were some promotions here and there, but by and large, if you wanted to get an Uber, you expected to pay for it. There was never any ecosystem where Uber was providing free transportation for everyone who wanted to get from Point A to Point B with the expectation that people would ditch their cars and get charged through the nose later.
Even companies like Spotify that started with free models and were unprofitable for a long time didn't have quite the same issues as OpenAI has. In 2016, the earliest year for which we have financials, Spotify's loss was about 20% of revenue. By 2018, the first year it was public, that had dropped to 1%, and stayed in that neighborhood until the company became profitable. OpenAI's loss last year was in excess of 100% of revenue, and is on pace to be nearly 70% this year, and that's after record revenue growth. And next year they're going to be on the hook for the first round of the 5-year, 300 billion deal with Oracle. Spotify has also had about a 25% conversion rate from free to paying customers throughout most of its history, though that's recently jumped to over 40%. ChatGTP currently has a conversion rate of around 3%. And Spotify at least ran ads on its free platform whereas free ChatGTP is pretty much all loss for OpenAI, and even the paid version lose money on every query.
So what we ultimately have then, is a company that loses a lot of money, is available for free, has a poor conversion rate for paid versions, and is selling itself as a product you didn't know you needed rather than filling an obvious demand. the leading company has already committed to spending several times more than the company has raised in its entire existence within the next five years, and they need their revenue to dectuple in the next four years to break even. They're also involved in a weird money-go-round situation with Nvidia and Oracle that's 100% reliant on them finding investors willing to lend them the GDP of Finland. And now they want to add video, a notoriously difficult thing to process even when you don't have to make the entire composition from scratch. Color me skeptical that this will be around in five years in anything approaching what it looks like today.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
Progressives were never demanding that the poor get increased access to credit cards; banks have never had a problem marketing high-interest, low limit credit cards to the poor. The argument was that it was stupid for banks to deny mortgages to people with jobs who were currently paying more in rent than what the mortgage payment would be if they bought, on the grounds that they were too high a risk. It's also an argument that no one has made in the 20 years since banks went further than the progressives asked them to and started writing mortgages to people who couldn't pay them off if they lived to be a million, then repackaged them as AAA securities.
Rov_Scam
18d ago
As an avid outdoorsman, my personal recommendation is something small and compact, like a .22 pistol. That way, when the bear is on top of you, it's a lot easier to get the barrel into your mouth...
All kidding aside, concerns about attacks by wildlife are usually the mark of a greenhorn, and rabies is a particularly odd thing to be concerned about. Your scenario about deer isn't really plausible, since deer fight by butting with their antlers and kicking, not by biting. They do get rabies, but not in numbers large enough to report outside of "other wildlife", and deer attacks on humans are rare to begin with, especially considering how often we encounter suburban deer that have lost their fear of humans. And if you're hiking in the deep dark woods, you aren't likely to see many deer to begin with, since they prefer forest edge ecosystems where there's more to browse.
If you somehow were attacked by a rabid buck, stabbing at it with a knife would be about the worst possible thing you could do, and shooting it wouldn't be much better. Rabies is usually transmitted through saliva, but it can be transmitted through blood as well, so drawing blood probably isn't a good idea. Rabies is usually transmitted through raccoons on in the East, skunks in the Midwest, and foxes in the Southwest, and bats can transmit it anywhere. Trying to defend against these small mammals while they are attacking you and unlikely to do any permanent damage seems like just increasing the risk of shooting or slicing yourself and making a bad situation worse. And if you do get attacked and are exposed to rabies, it's not like it's a death sentence. Rabies has an incubation period of several weeks, plenty of time to get to a doctor for prophylactic treatment, which is almost 100% effective. It's even more effective if you wash the wound thoroughly immediately after getting bitten.
Who called Romney a fascist? The only example I can find is a comment made around the time of the Democratic convention by a delegate from Kansas, but I'd bet you couldn't name him without looking. Maybe you can find something I can't, but I've done a bit of looking and I can't find any contemporaneous sources describing him as such. The "binders full of women" comment is a different kettle of fish entirely, largely because he embellished the story. He didn't go out and look for female appointees and compile a binder; it was handed to him by MassGAP, a bipartisan advocacy group. The further criticism was that he spent 25 years in business and evidently didn't know any qualified women.
As for the rest of your comment, the glib thing to say would be that Democrats are indifferent to white men while Republicans are indifferent to everyone else, but that would be overly reductive. In another post I made today about jury instructions I say that:
The rest of the post gives some additional context, but the upshot is that lawyers need to put themselves in the shoes of the people who will actually be acting on the jury instructions rather than automatically assume that since they make sense to them they'll make sense to anyone. And this is true for most of the legal system; if you have a system created and run by lawyers and judges you have a system that works great for lawyers and judges, even though when the system fails it ultimately isn't lawyers and judges who have to deal with the consequences. Any number of legal reforms over the years were met with stiff resistance from within the legal community along the lines of "that won't work because this is the way we've always done it and it simply can't be done any other way. This is true even for things that seem blindingly obvious in retrospect. In 1843 there was a murder at Yale University. A young man was charged with the crime, posted bond, then returned home to Pennsylvania, at which point the Connecticut prosecutors closed the case. In the view of the lawyers involved in the case, this was an appropriate resolution. That’s the way things were done. A bond is posted to ensure that the defendant appears at trial. If the defendant doesn’t appear for trial, he forfeits the bond, and the books are closed. It has to be done that way, the lawyers argued. Otherwise, what is the point of posting bond? The press had a different take. As the press saw it, the failure to prosecute the murderer because the murderer was wealthy enough to forfeit the bond was an outrage. The lawyers thought that the reaction of the press was ignorant. These people just didn’t understand the process. The press brought to it a different perspective—and the press was right, and the press won. The practice of abandoning warrants when a defendant posted bond and fled the jurisdiction was gradually curtailed.
What we've had in America, historically, is a system that works well for white men and varying degrees of less well for everyone else. And while it hasn't worked well for all white men, as a group white men have been in the best position. You can mock the Green New Deal statement, and I'm generally not a fan of this kind of posturing but it at least makes sense. It doesn't name white men, but every group named has a counterpart, and alleging indifference to the counterparts ranges from cringe-inducing to ridiculous:
The whole point is that some people in the US are in a worse position than the should be as a result of policies that were designed with indifference to them but which worked well for certain majorities, and that it is more just to change those policies so that we have a system that works equally well for everybody. One of the more recent frontiers in legal reform is getting rid of the plea bargain system. There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I'm not necessarily in favor of the idea, but one of the worst arguments against it is that it isn't feasible because there's no way we could have that many trials. Complaining about alleged Democratic indifference to white men is like arguing that the plea bargaining system is necessary because it's easier for the lawyers and judges.
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