Rov_Scam
2d ago
See my last paragraph. Though I doubt they'd be profitable immediately. The whole inference is profitable thing evidently only works if you're using non-GAAP accounting that relies on things like "annualized income" which didn't exist until startups needed to justify their burn rates. It's a marketing term, not an accounting term.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
There's also the water problem. The ground is a very good insulator, and you have to cool the water somehow. Cooling towers in the middle of nowhere would definitely raise suspicion.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
The moat is the trillion or so that's already been spent on a technology that can't turn a profit. VC is getting close to tapped out, and it's unlikely that some upstart company is going to get access to the compute necessary to make any kind of impact at this stage of the game. The only possible exception would be a company that can demonstrate that the huge compute requirements can be made more reasonable by more efficient coding algorithms, but as long as the focus is on building more impressive shit there isn't going to be much call for that. It's kind of like the auto industry in the late 60s, when gas was cheap enough that automakers cared more about increasing horsepower or the size of a luxury land yacht than fuel efficiency. They could theoretically build more efficient cars and indeed had at the start of the decade, but there wasn't much call for something like the Ford Falcon by the end of the decade.
The difference here is that the bigger, more powerful models had higher profit margins than the more basic models, and the basic models still made money through volume. AI is in a situation where most people are getting it for free, and the few paying customers are getting steep discounts. And those customers screamed earlier this year when the companies started charging the true cost and sent them a bill at the end of the month. So now you're in the double predicament of needing to ask VC for money so that you can build a more efficient model that does essentially the same thing as the current models, which also aren't profitable. It's not like they can make the money back by charging less, because the prices people are paying are completely untethered from the cost of providing the service.
My own cynical view is that they want a pause because they require tens of billions per year just to stay solvent, and the investors who are putting up this money are getting to the point where they are going to start expecting some kind of return on their investment, not more tin cup rattling because the 60 billion that they needed last year has turned into 100 billion they'll need this year. One gets the sense that VC is completely held hostage to AI companies because they're in so deep that throwing good money after bad at least has the possibility of returning a profit, whereas cutting their losses now would obliterate their entire investment. It's like the old bromide about how if you owe the bank $100,000 the bank owns you, but if you owe them $100,000,000 you own them.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".
You're essentially asking that they wrote a different book. The introduction is pretty clear that the point isn't to turn the reader into the next Hemingway, but merely to keep him from being among the countless thousands whose work never gets a second look from a publisher because it's so bad. There are no actual novels with this stuff (or at least very few), because manuscripts with these kinds of non-subtle mistakes don't get published, and things that don't get published aren't readily available for reference. It's similar to how I can tell a few war stories from my old job, but I'd be reluctant to write a book full of them because I'd want to get all of the details correct and I'm not in the habit of hanging onto files from jobs I no longer have. I doubt the authors hang on to rejected manuscripts, but they've probably seen enough patterns to be able to explain the mistakes. So they can't just quote passages verbatim. There's also the fact that exaggerated examples make better teaching tools than subtle ones. If I'm trying to explain to a beginner how a synthesizer works and what all the buttons and knobs do, I don't explain resonance be making a slight adjustment (as I might when putting a sound together); I explain it by cranking it up as high as it will go without the sound breaking up, then turning it down again.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Oil flows being 2/3 of prewar isn't as bad as what they were around Easter, but even if volume were 100% of prewar, there's more to the story. They're getting to that number by running the straits at night, transloading into smaller vessels, using specialized crews, and doing other things to limit the danger. These things all cost money, on top of the increased premiums insurers are charging. But as you quote in your post:
Zoom in: After the MOU fell apart, the military worked to reopen the strait unilaterally. The effort included several elements:
Together with the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. military task force started guiding ships through the southern channel of the strait while giving them air cover and intercepting Iranian drone and cruise missile attacks.
A two-week U.S. bombing campaign significantly undercut the IRGC's capacity to attack ships crossing the strait.
A mine-sweeping operation involved Navy divers, Navy SEALs, underwater and surface drones, and private contractors to detect and neutralize the mines.
A blockade of Iranian ports was restored.
This is not a good thing. What this means, essentially, that what oil is flowing is largely reliant on a US carrier group positioned in the area. Until that carrier group can leave with little risk of any knock-on effects, the war hasn't been won. You come here every week or so and post the kind of stats that could have easily shown that the US was winning in Vietnam in 1969, in Iraq in 2007, and in Afghanistan in 2015. Yet nobody would consider those wars successes. Trump himself ran on a promise that he wouldn't replicate the mistakes that got us into those wars. And instead he got us into the naval version of any one of those, with worse consequences for failure. Whether it's worse to have 100,000 troops tied up or a whole carrier fleet is a matter for debate. What isn't a matter for debate is that Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz has real, immediate consequences for Americans that Communists controlling Vietnam or the Taliban controlling Afghanistan simply didn't. Whatever the oil flows actually are, it's cold comfort when I'm paying a dollar a gallon more for gas than I was a year ago. Until the troops can leave without risk of things getting worse, the war isn't over.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Advertising at least has a use. I'd prefer banning Good Good, as they have no use. It's the golf version of bad YouTube clickbait, with videos along the lines of "Can I Break 100 Using Only a Pool Cue?" and "Can I Beat Lee Westwood If His Feet Are Encased in Concrete?"
Rov_Scam
10d ago
What would Canada have to do regarding fentanyl for you to be in favor of taking the trade situation back to 2024?
Rov_Scam
11d ago
I don't know that it's so much that she made it up on the advice of her attorney as it is that it's a plausible defense and the only one really available to her. When people commit unspeakable crimes in the absence of any other motive, the default is to believe they are mentally ill, and she had a history of mental illness. The question is whether her mental illness rose to the level that rendered her unable to tell the difference between right and wrong or appreciate the consequences of her actions. There's definitely enough meat on the bone for her to amount a plausible defense, and it's up to the forensic experts to present the evidence and the jury to decide whether she meets the standard. I'm responding because I don't want anyone to get the impression that I think there's some Yates Standard that Clancy doesn't meet; Yates isn't the standard, and I know too little about the Clancy case to make a judgment about her culpability one way or the other. I was just responding to the original article, which made it sound like the two cases were closer than they were, and that even Yates wasn't as easy a call as the article made it sound.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
I don't know enough about the Clancy case to make any serious comments about it, but one big difference from the Yates case was that Yates had a well-documented history of psychiatric problems, including hospitalizations and multiple suicide attempts, and her family was told that she needed round-the-clock supervision and was not to be left alone, let alone responsible for five small children. And she was still convicted; part of the story everyone forgets is that her conviction was vacated after it was revealed that a prosecution witness claimed she got the idea from an episode of Law and Order than didn't exist (keep in mind that in 2001 there was no easy way to tell if a television episode with a particular plot existed; it only came up in the Yates case afterwards when someone associated with the show got wind of the testimony). Clancy, on the other hand, had some history of psychiatric treatment, but not nearly to the same degree Yates did.
The reason I bring this up is because if you look at the history of insanity defenses, they became prominent in the 1960s, had their heyday in the 1970s, and died a quick death in the 1980s. They existed prior to the 1960s but were relatively rare because available psychiatric treatment was limited and a defendant who was actually psychotic was likely to end up hospitalized for life regardless of the verdict. Once medications became available that enabled people with severe mental health problems to lead normal lives, insanity defenses became more attractive, as the problem was not mental illness in and of itself but untreated mental illness. These two reforms—treatment rather than institutionalization and the recognition that people with severe psychiatric problems shouldn't be held criminally responsible—were fine independently and had been recognized as positives for decades by this point, but the changing landscape made them collide in a way that was disastrous.
People often think that Hinckley was the end of the insanity defense, but Hinckley is a bad example because he was obviously nuts, and ended up locked up for most of his life. He also didn't actually kill anyone. The real end was the Dan White case. White assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, and Willie Brown and another supervisor were also on the list. White's case wasn't strictly an insanity defense but a diminished capacity defense, i.e. his depression at the time of the killings reduced his culpability from murder to manslaughter, and he ended up serving 5 years of a 7 year sentence. What miffed the public the most about the verdict was that White was a normal, well-adjusted adult up until the time of the attacks who had shown no indication of needing psychiatric treatment. The case was the most high-profile of a series of cases wherein the defendant took a half-hour break from sanity to kill a few people before returning to normal. They either claimed diminished capacity, like White, or went through with the whole defense and were committed to mental institutions, only to be released a few years or even months later after psychiatrists determined that they weren't actually nuts and stopped treating them, and they successfully petitioned for their releases on the basis that they couldn't be held in a psychiatric hospital if they weren't receiving any treatment.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
"Appeals to the prurient interest", for the purpose of the law means, to put it as bluntly as possible, "used for masturbatory purposes". In other words, if it isn't something that the average person would consider suitable fap material, it doesn't appeal to the prurient interest. I'm sure there are a few gooner types with weird fantasies about unicorns with hard cocks, but I don't know that an erect penis alone would be enough to qualify something as obscene.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
Is this the level of delusion Trump supporters have reached, where Trump doing and saying indefensibly stupid things that contradict non-stupid things other people in the administration say is now just part of some big trick? Seriously, how is it a trick? Is Vance not knowing Trump's position supposed to make him look competent? In what election cycle, anywhere in the world, anywhere in history, has the strategy you've describe worked? Probably never, because it's so stupid I doubt anyone would ever attempt it, and if this is really the best the GOP has they're even dumber than I thought.
Even if I humor you for a second and assume that it would be possibly, then the way they're playing it doesn't make sense. It's not like you see Republican politicians putting up any real opposition to Trump. What happens is they say something, Trump contradicts them, and they either ignore it or try to explain away how they don't really disagree with Trump after all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Vance made any statements about how he advised against the war from the beginning, supported the president out of a sense of duty, but has come to the conclusion that the costs it's borne on Americans mean it's no longer defensible. And he's supposed to be the frontrunner! One would assume he's getting campaign advice from Kamala Harris on how to run as veep to an unpopular incumbent without criticizing the incumbent for the things that are making him unpopular. And he can't get fired or primaried. And behind him they have Marco Rubio, who at the moment seems more concerned with dismantling the government of an irrelevant country we aren't at war with than doing anything about the war he helped convince Trump to start.
Who else do they have who is actually criticizing the president? Ted Cruz is more hawkish on Iran than Trump. Marjorie Taylore Greene is unelectable and supposedly out of politics anyway. And Thomas Massie just lost an election because he wasn't enough of a Trump supporter. Which is another thing; there isn't even a movement among primary candidates to cross Trump. In my own neck of the woods, every single Republican candidate ran on being more in line with Trump than his RINO opponent. The idea that Republicans are going to suddenly, en masse, turn on Trump in 2028 is ludicrous, and the idea that voters would buy a last-minute face turn is even more ludicrous.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
It's nothing more than a Kaepernick situation. If Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the anthem didn't generate the controversy it did, he would have found a job in 2018. If he were the same player he was in 2012, San Francisco would have resigned him. But in 2018 he was a serviceable backup at best, and there are plenty of other guys available to fill that role who don't come with the attendant controversy. Ghent isn't going to risk the controversy that would inevitably come their way by sticking their neck out for a postdoc whom they had employed for a total of five months.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
The only thing that makes less sense than this proposal is that people here are taking it seriously, or acting as though it's representative of a certain kind of person. This is a Change.org petition, not a legislative bill, so the bar is already pretty low. And 3,000 people is nothing. It wasn't that long ago that 45,000 people signed a Change.org petition calling for an investigation into Rachel Gunn for being bad at breakdancing. Some people are idiots.
Rov_Scam
18d ago
Yes, after the next one. What do you find so intriguing about those neighborhoods?
Rov_Scam
19d ago
Companies can't act pro se. That's a privilege reserved for individuals. The exception is a sole proprietorship, since the business isn't a separate entity from the individual, and some states have made exceptions for single member LLCs, but the general idea is the same: The business is essentially one person. Once two people are involved then there becomes a question of who the person is acting on behalf of, and no state is going to allow a company to "act pro se" by just hiring somebody without a law license to act as the lawyer.
think if they had fought, they had a decent chance of finding age verification unconstitutional, since age verification laws in other states have already been struck down (although those only applied to social media).
The Supreme Court found the exact law in question to be constitutional, though this happened after the default judgment was entered.
Yes, I know a fight is costly in many different ways, but what's the alternative?
Complying with the law would be a good start
Rov_Scam
21d ago
No. I generally don't follow archives, as I find live albums in general to be superfluous, with certain exceptions (most notably the Grateful Dead). I'll check out the Can archive, though, since you mentioned it. I woul add that I'm one of those weirdos who likes their later period.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
I've had the opposite experience. When I'm miserable I don't have any desire to listen to music, and when I'm in a good mood I'm more likely to want music on. One would think that a compulsive listener such as myself would take advantage of the 8 to 10 hours a day I have available to listen to music at work, but I rarely do. And when I do, it's usually because I have a lot of work to do, there's a long album that's on the list due to completeness but I don't have much faith in and am thus dreading to listen, and I save it for a time when I have a ton of work to do and not a lot of time to do it and hope that the tedium of listening to a long, lousy album dilates time to the extent that allows me to finish in a reasonable amount of time. Worst case scenario, the time evaporates along with the album. It's basically a hedge.
Fortunately I mostly listen for enjoyment, and I try to combine my listening with activities that I find enjoyable as well. The upshot is that if there's something I want to listen to I'd rather save it for when I'm on the bike, or out walking in the woods. I've put entire bands on hold for the winter because I know I'll enjoy them more when exercising outside in warm weather. Typical itinerary, some years back, which has changed only because the music I listen to changes based on what I haven't heard yet: Bike ride, late Saturday morning into the afternoon, maybe I have a picnic to attend later in the day, so I'm on a schedule. Enough time for a 20 mile trail ride. Start with Krautrock, something repetitive to get me in the pedaling rhythm. Then move on to 70s hard rock like Humble Pie or Faces, something a little more exciting, as the heat of the day builds. This is what I'm listening to at the turn around point. Then switch over to something more Americana, maybe Ry Cooder, as it's now afternoon. Totally different if I'm going for a 6 mile walk after dinner, which I was doing every day for a while on the same path: Start with Southern Rock while it's still broad daylight. As the sun gets low in the sky, switch to British Folk, like Dando Shaft or Lindisfarne, and as I'm approaching my car at dusk let things get a bit darker, like early Pink Floyd or Procol Harum.
Rov_Scam
22d ago
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Is the law dumb and is Texas's war on porn quixotic? Yes, but the Supreme Court has had their say, so it's a done deal. Once you strip away all the culture war nonsense surrounding the law itself, this plays out just like any other case. Kick got sued, they didn't respond, judgment was entered against them on terms the AG could pretty much name. When, after 2 years, they neither complied not paid any of the $10,000/day in statutory penalties for noncompliance, the judge issued a writ to allow the Plaintiff to seize assets. If they want those assets back, they have to comply with the court order and pay the accrued penalties. Nothing unusual here. Were there jurisdictional arguments? Sure, and they could have made them had they responded to the suit, but they didn't. In fact, there's a few arguments they could have made that have nothing to do with the validity of the statute. They also could have settled with the AG. But when you write:
Contesting the case would require funding a lawyer to stand in a highly disfavored setting, in a jurisdiction willing to write laws specifically targeting the company, in a civil case with correspondingly low standards of proof and no right to court-appointed representation for the indigent.
The judge in this case was the same judge who excoriated the Texas legislature in an order staying enforcement of the state's controversial private cause of action abortion law. I'm not saying that she would have necessarily ruled in their favor, but not all judges are shills. Especially since judges in Texas are elected, and most of these suits are filed in areas where few are likely to vote for someone who will do whatever Ken Paxton says. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. This isn't like gambling, where you can't lose if you don't play. Besides that, it's unlikely that they were out to destroy Kick. There are approximately 10 million porn sites that aren't complying with the Texas law, Kick is hardly the biggest, and the AG does not have unlimited resources. In a normal world, this case ends with a deal that probably has the AG agreeing to waive the penalties in exchange for Kick agreeing to comply by a date certain.
As for the indigence thing, if they're truly indigent then the domain name is worthless and shutting it down means nothing. But I doubt they're too indigent to fight this. Yes, taking it to the mat would be expensive, but unless they're true believers, they'll settle. If you own any kind of business, you have to accept the likelihood that you're going to get sued at some point. Most businesses pay for insurance, so it's not as big a deal as it sounds. I don't know what kind of insurance Kick had, or whether it would have covered this, but I doubt that a real defense would have cost them more than $25,000, and that's a generous estimate. Realistically, it's less than 10, assuming they respond, file and argue a motion or two, and negotiate a settlement that doesn't involve fines. Hell, skip the motions and just settle if you're really strapped for cash.
Does it sell out their principles to comply with a bullshit law? Probably. But as a civil defense attorney I can tell you that 100% of clients think that 100% of the suits filed against them are complete bullshit, even sophisticated corporate clients, even when the claims are beyond reasonable, and approximately 100% of them settle anyway. Because it turns out that $10,000 to settle the case is a lot less than the $10,000/day they'll owe if they don't settle. Yeah, getting sued sucks. But some companies get sued approximately every 30 seconds and manage to survive.
Rov_Scam
24d ago
How was he actually discriminated against? You don't just apply to be a pilot and get put into company training. You need to get a pilot's license before you can even consider getting a job, and you have to start doing private jobs and work your way up to being an airline pilot. There is no evidence that this guy had a pilot's license, or indeed ever tried to take the first steps in becoming a pilot. And flight school isn't like Harvard; they'll accept anyone who pays.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
Looping in @phailyoor
I've seen this quoted a lot, and I think I'm the only one who's actually read the source material. It's a fairly boring diary he kept in 1995 that mostly consists of stuff like what he had for dinner, how fascinated he is by Photoshop, and emails about politics with Stewart Brand quoted in their entirety. When this little musing appears in mid-December it comes off less like anything quote-worthy and more like a half-baked shower thought. If he'd meant anything profound by it he could have expanded the idea for the section of essays which comprises the much more interesting section of the book, but he didn't. If you want to nitpick, it's unlikely that the things he was referring to are the things everyone thinks he's referring to, and when he's unambiguously referring to something, he's wrong in the sense that it doesn't really make his point. To take each item:
-
CD Distortion: When CDs first came out DAC technology wasn't mature yet, at least at the consumer level, and a lot of early CD players sounded bad. The problem was more or less corrected by 1985, but there were a lot of analog purists out there looking to crap on digital technology who would cite this as proof of digital inferiority long after anyone knew what they were talking about. To my knowledge, there is no aesthetic that uses the "harsh digital sound" of the first CD players for artistic purposes. The Loudness Wars weren't really a thing in 1995; they'd technically started, but were limited to a few albums, and weren't even that bad. CDs were louder overall than they had been a few years prior, but this was because technological advances meant that engineers were no longer guessing where 0db was.
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The Jitteriness of Digital Video: One of the entries in the book has his musings about the contemporary ubiquity of interactive CD-ROMs. In case you don't remember, having video like this was a novelty, and a 750MB CD could only hold so much of it, so it was heavily compressed and blotchy. And, yes, this could make things look jittery. This survived well into the streaming video era, and as such never really went away. There is plenty of crappy low-bitrate content on YouTube, and no one is watching it if a better version exists, let alone seeking it out. It doesn't impart any nostalgia.
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The Crap Sound of 8-Bit: An effete 47-year-old Brit wasn't referencing the sound of an NES. Remember, in the mid-1990s storage space and processing power were expensive, and consumer digital recording was in its infancy. Prior to the release of the Sound Blaster 16 in 1992, all PC audio was 8-bit, and a lot of consumer digital recorders were using 8-bit ADCs well into the 1990s and even early 2000s. In and of itself, 8-bit doesn't sound that much worse than 16-bit, just a higher noise floor comparable to a professional-grade cassette tape. But if you were recording in 8-bit, the rest of your equipment probably wasn't that great. A professional musician and producer like Eno would have associated 8-bit with home studio demos that weren't intended for public release. I am unaware of anyone trying to sound like this today for aesthetic reasons.
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The distorted guitar and blues singer: These are certainly used today for aesthetic reasons. In fact, nobody ever stopped using them for aesthetic reasons. Eno's quote implies that rock bands would have stopped using distortion once higher-quality amplifiers became available, and that blues musicians would have sounded more professional once the music sold well enough to justify paying better singers, and that these would have only come back at some later date when people discovered the "rawness" or whatever of the early recordings. This isn't the case. These were aesthetic choices from the beginning.
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Grainy film and bleached-out black and white: As above; I don't know that there was ever a time when photographers didn't use film grain and overexposure as a conscious artistic choice. These were always more present in home photography than in professional photography, and they are almost always more about use of consumer-grade film and not knowing how to measure exposure than of any technological limitation of the medium. Hell, for a long time Kodachrome was the consumer film of choice, and that's pretty much the opposite of grainy. The only inherently grainy consumer film I can think of is Instamatic, which can be nostalgic but was also only used on really cheap cameras (I had a Ninja Turtles camera as a kid that shot Insta).
But my overall point stands: It's not worth exploring too deeply because it's a throwaway quote that was never meant to be taken seriously.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
Why would anyone pay the $20/month? To be impressed? It wasn't long ago that someone asked what they're supposed to use AI for, and the response was a list of about a dozen completely frivolous things that can only be described as glorified low-grade entertainment. I'm sure some people find it useful for niche things. But for most people it's nothing more than a glorified search engine, and expecting people to spend money for it is like asking them to pay for a subscription to Google.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
The fact that AI may only generate these kinds of errors a small percentage of the time is only a reasonable argument when the comparison is with something that makes similar errors a greater percentage of the time. Writing a computer program that queries a database for commodity prices and gives the current values of a given quantity is trivial to write, and can be done relatively easily on a home computer from the 1980s. Despite the relatively low tech, it won't make mistakes very often, and when it does they will be in the form of the program crashing entirely, not misplacing a decimal point or giving a plausible but incorrect response. I have been using Excel for decades, and this has not been a problem. Even if the LLM output is only wrong one time in every thousand attempts, that's still immeasurably worse than our simple computer program. And then you add in the fact that you're making this calculation through a process that requires a billion-dollar offsite computer that cost untold billions to train to get an answer that is less reliable than from a pocket calculator given away for free at a bank, and people are going to look askance.
"But," you may say, "what you describe requires a separate program. The beauty of the LLM is that it can answer general purpose questions." Which is true, but if the error rate is too high, it still isn't particularly useful. In the commodity price example, if I actually need to know the price of 0.035 ounces of gold for business purposes, it's worth it for me to have a computer program designed for the purpose that will always give an accurate answer. If I don't, then I'm not paying for a technological solution, period.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
The difference is that BYD isn't pushing their 25-year-old cars for marketing purposes. For example, most of the time that a new food product comes out, you have to buy it if you want to try it. Sometimes, the manufacturer will hire a company to distribute free samples in grocery stores. Imagine if, in order to save money, the samples all came from batches that QC rejected for being not up to par. If the product failed to sell, and market research suggested that people weren't impressed with the samples, and the company's response was "You can't judge the product based on the free samples; you have to get the real version", nobody would have any sympathy for them. It would end up in marketing textbooks as an example of what not to do, and people like Rory Sutherland would repeat the story every time they gave a talk.
Looping in @sleepyegg, @07mk, and @JarJarJedi
You need to take into consideration that York may not be the billionaire you think he is. I obviously don't know his asset profile, but it's not his team, it's his family's. He hasn't had a real job in his life other than with the team, and he's a generation removed from any inheritance. The only entrepreneur in the family was the grandfather, Edward DeBartolo, Sr., who was a shopping mall magnate. DeBartolo was the owner of the Penguins, and his daughter, Denise DeBartolo York, was the team president and an executive in the shopping mall business. When the 49ers went up for sale in 1977, he couldn't buy them outright, as NFL ownership policy precludes owners from having a stake in any other pro sports team. So he gave the team to his son, Eddie. The real estate market collapsed at the end of the 1980s and DeBartolo needed cash, and just as the Penguins were winning their first championship, he was forced to sell the team. This didn't solve the cashflow problem, and he was forced to take the company public, which led him to retire. He passed away in 1994, and the shares of the company were acquired by Simon a couple years later.
Fast forward to the late 90s, and Eddie, who had always had his hands in questionable business dealings, got in some hot water over public corruption in some kind of riverboat gambling deal. The NFL suspended him for a year, but instead of serving the suspension he decided to trade his share of the team to his sister and her husband in exchange for what was left of the family business. Denise's son Jed is at this point in college, and after a brief stint at a financial firm he took a bullshit nepo job with the 49ers. Denise gave him day-to-day control of the team in 2008, in a decision that was widely mocked due to his complete lack of any experience other than liking football. Nonetheless, he turned around what had by that point become a moribund franchise, and everyone forgot about it. In 2024 he acquired enough shares in the team to become principal owner.
Earlier this year, Jed filed for divorce. He and his wife had been living in a large house in the Bay Area, but instead of just buying another house like one would expect a billionaire to do, he moved back to a house his parents own in Youngstown. He doesn't have any money other than what he earned from the team, and he just spent a large portion of that money to acquire a controlling share. NFL ownership policy requires that final voting authority is vested in a single individual, and unless he owns significantly more than 51%, which given his history is doubtful, his net worth is somewhere north of 4 billion dollars. Since he's getting divorced, and acquired an unknown but likely significant portion of the team subsequent to his 2011 marriage, I'd estimate that he's going to owe his ex-wife at least a billion dollars as part of the divorce settlement. Ownership policy prevents him from giving her a share of the team that would eliminate his controlling interest, and he likely doesn't have enough non-voting shares to make a significant dent. This means he has to set off the settlement with other assets, but again, he's unlikely to have this kind of money, and what he does have contributes to the overall pie.
The upshot is that his attorneys are going to have to get creative when it comes to figuring out a settlement, and now is definitely not the time to be taking international flights (which would likely be private or at least first class), or spending a lot of time in Vegas, or doing anything else suggesting he has a lot of disposable cash, and there's a good chance that he doesn't have a ton of disposable cash at the moment. So you have a guy who is getting divorced after 15 years of marriage, likely never hired a prostitute before, is a thousand miles away from his kids in a town not exactly known for excitement or for having a lot of high-end call girls. So when he wanted to get his rocks off, he went online and tried to find some local whores who he could afford to pay and, at the very least, would be cheap enough that his ex's attorney wouldn't be asking too many questions about where a few grand disappeared to, or why he bought plane tickets to Australia.
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