Rov_Scam
7d ago
Lol, I hang out with Republicans all the time. I watched election returns with people actively rooting for a Trump victory, and I watched the Pens game last night with a guy I often get into arguments with (though we didn't talk politics at all last night). By "Trump and the Republicans" I was referring to the habit of politicians to assign the attributes of the most visible leader to the party as a whole. There could be some media bubble where Fox News et al are repeatedly expressing compassion for migrants and the mainstream media simply isn't reporting on it, but to my knowledge, if any such rhetoric does exist, it's drowned out by statements about migrants all being criminals.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
What makes you think that? As someone whose job it is to evaluate cases for settlement potential, it would be high but not totally out of line considering the heinous nature of the act and the age of the victims. High sympathy factor plus incredibly unlikable defendant means big verdict. 1.44 billion divided by 28 victims equals about 50 million per, which is less than a lot of cases you've never heard about. Like the products liability case against Mitsubishi that netted a single plaintiff nearly a billion dollars. Or the medical malpractice case that awarded over 100 million to a child born with cerebral palsy. Or the 50 million mesothelioma verdict awarded to the widow of a guy in his 60s (and that was back in 2010).
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Your analogy doesn't hold because the purpose of a civil suit isn't to punish the defendant but to compensate the plaintiffs for their loss. There were 15 plaintiffs in the case, and each was awarded about 64 million in compensatory damages. The judge then added on another 30 million per plaintiff in punitive damages (and if there ever were a case for punitive damages, this is the one). On a per-plaintiff basis, it's more like 35 dollars an hour for the punitive part. And he didn't lose the suit because he denied the event had happened in a general sense. An equivalent to your analogy would be if a holocaust denier, who admits that he actually believes the holocaust really happened, publicly denied it, claimed specific survivors were merely actors, posted their addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged a decade-long pattern of harassment for the purpose of making money.
Anyway, the analogy doesn't hold because it suggests that civil verdicts should be dependent on how highly you value time incarcerated. If you destroy a piece of artwork worth tens of millions of dollars, the theoretical civil settlement will be worth a lot more than the max 7 years in prison if you're doing some kind of hourly rate equivalent.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Se my comment above, but AOC will have it a lot easier than Kamala, if only because it's a lot easier to backtrack from a position you took a decade earlier as an idealistic 29-year-old who was new to public office than from a position you took in the last election cycle as a 55-year-old sitting US Senator who had been in politics for 15 years by that point.
I mean, the "my values haven't changed" schtick wasn't good, but I can't imagine her saying anything that would have played better. California is an oil-producing state so she couldn't use ignorance as an excuse. The technology was old enough by 2019 that most of the specific arguments in favor of its environmental benefits had been made. There was no new information that came out between 2020 and 2024. If she'd been against fracking in 2012 and changed course in 2019 it would have been easy to give her a pass, but there's really no good explanation. The real explanation is probably that she's against a fracking ban now for the same reason she was in favor of one in 2019 — because that's the position her advisors told her would give her the best chance of winning, which leads one to wonder what her actual thoughts on the matter are.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.
Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
He's an idealogue who tracks further to the right of most conservatives, essentialy a slightly more credible version of Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor-Greene. He's known for making intentionally provocative statements that his colleagues don't even try to defend, as well as engaging in stupid publicity stunts. After the GOP took the House in 2022, he insinuated that they should put policy-making on hold and focus on investigating and impeaching Democrats they didn't like. He was the ringleader of Kevin McCarthy's ouster as speaker, earning him a lot of enemies in his own party. He's also a sleazeball, having been accused of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use, showing other members of congress nude photos of women he'd slept with, misappropriating campaign funds for personal use, and accepting impermissible gifts. The centerpiece of all of this is a sex trafficking investigation he got roped into. A close associate of his pleaded guilty and while the evidence didn't support an indictment for any of the crimes that were being investigated, it's pretty clear that Gaetz was partying with this guy and paying him for prostitutes. It didn't help that Gaetz was the only member of congress to vote against a sex trafficking bill. He topped it all off by asking Trump for a blanket pardon for any crimes he may have committed.
While he is a barred attorney, his legal career isn't one typically befitting of an Attorney General. The sum total of his legal experience is a few years as a junior associate at a small law firm, where he handles pennyante matters like debt collection, a dispute over a volleyball net, and a stolen boat. He owes his entire political career to his father, a successful Florida politician who bankrolled his first run for office. the only conceivable reason Trump would nominate him for AG are his personal loyalty (he supported Trump from the beginning and hasn't wavered) and his zeal for going after political enemies. Gaetz resigned from the House after being named as AG; the mainstream view is that he was under investigation for numerous ethics violations and used the nomination as cover to avoid the issuance of the report, now that the House Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction. It seems unlikely, however, that Gaetz will ever actually be AG. No Democrat will vote for his confirmation, and only 4 Republicans would need to oppose him to block his nomination. Susan Collins of Maine has already suggested that he's unacceptable, and the guy has enough enemies within his own party that it shouldn't be too hard to find three more (Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell are almost certain nos, and one more wouldn't be hard to find). Any confirmation hearing would air all this dirty laundry publicly in a way that hasn't been done yet. To this point, news of his improprieties has been of the continuing story nature where information comes out in dribs and drabs over the course of years. The only people who can tell you all the ins and outs are the kinds of political junkies who follow scandals involving minor figures. Given the increased scrutiny that's already being given, I'd be surprised if this nomination isn't withdrawn before we even get to the confirmation stage.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I think it's worth pointing out that the companies you named aren't exactly comparable. Taking them one by one:
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Theranos was a fraudulent company that made an ineffective product, lied about its effectiveness, faked demonstrations and test results, and not only parlayed that into a ton of VC funding. The weird thing about it is that they nonetheless plowed forward by entering into contracts with large retailers that they couldn't possibly deliver on, and the whole operation was soon revealed as a sham.
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FTX was a legitimate investment firm that fraudulently mishandled client funds. Years ago, my grandparents were victims of a similar fraud when their investment manager was telling them he was investing their money in the market but was really using it to make loans to his son's woodworking business. When the woodworking business couldn't cover the loans, he didn't have the money for investors withdrawing funds, eventually someone called the DA's office, and the guy was convicted and died in prison. This guy was a legitimate locally trusted investment manager that normal people used, not some obvious fraudster. When rumors started circulating that he was crooked, a lot of people, including my parents, pulled their money out, but my grandparents had been investing with him for years and said they trusted the guy.
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WeWork was a legitimate company that was able to hype itself into a valuation so high it defied common sense. It was effectively a commercial real estate company that marketed itself as a tech company. The estimated valuation was so high leading up to the IPO that investors realized there was no real room for growth, not to mention that they were losing more money than could be reasonably explained. There were some questionable valuation processes (e.g. counting every desk job in a city where they were operating as a potential customer rather than a more reasoned analysis of the market for ad hoc office space), but none of this was exactly secret.
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Broadcast.com was a successful company that Yahoo ran into the ground after acquiring it for a lot of money. I don't even know why it's included here because it was well past the VC stage at the time of purchase and it's just another failed acquisition.
So of the four companies, Theranos was the only one that engaged in fraud to attract VC money. FTX engaged in fraud to prop up another business. WeWork used non-fruadulent puffery to attract investment, and Broadcast was badly managed by a corporate giant.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
Lol, Uber has been offering this for years.
Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.
It's common in law, too, and you can also order food if you're working late. I worked in an office on the North Side from 2015 to 2017, when we moved into new digs in the Strip District. The move roughly coincided with Uber Eats launching in Pittsburgh and us switching over to them for our "late night perks". To be clear, the late-night car service is aimed toward people who rely on transit to get to work and is only offered by companies that don't offer parking passes. the rationale was that after 8 pm, transit switched from operating every 15 minutes to operating every hour, and since we were on the North Side you'd have to either walk across the bridge to Downtown or take 2 buses unless you happened to be on your route already, and doubling the wait times made that impracticable. I lived in the exurbs at the time and almost always drove in anyway, so I never used it.
Anyway, prior to the move the firm used a black car service which was better than Uber but a bit intimidating for normal people. A guy a worked with who used it once was kind of freaked out when a guy showed up in a Lincoln and opened the door for him. The reason why we switched was that the process, for both that and ordering food after 7 pm, used to be cumbersome. You had to use the company credit card and get receipts, and then fill out an expense report and submit it to HR. Then, just to make things perverse, HR would come back to me with another form I had to sign to demonstrate that the expense had been approved by an attorney (even though I already signed the expense report). The HR lady was thrilled about the switch because we could just order everything through the company account which would put the appropriate restrictions on time, location, price, etc., and then not worry about the forms. Then like 6 months later they started charging an additional 10% on business accounts and she was mildly pissed. I still had to deal with a ton of other credit card approvals, petty cash forms, reimbursement forms, mileage logs, and other bullshit that I (and everyone else) waited to do until the last minute to the long-suffering HR lady's eternal consternation. Good times.
In any event, I haven't heard of anyone using Uber for Business other than for occasional transportation like when traveling out of town or something like that. I don't see it ever becoming an everyday perk for anyone, let alone common enough to have any significant impact on traffic. Perks are usually commensurate with the level of responsibility and the nature of the work involved. Lots of people work late, but most of them can't bill food to the company because the added value doesn't justify it. When the extra 3 hours you spend at work clearly nets the company an additional thousand dollars, 20 bucks worth of takeout isn't an issue. Company cars are usually reserved for people in sales or other jobs that require you to be on the road all day, and even then they have to pay taxes on them based on personal use. One firm I worked at gave the attorneys parking passes but admins had to take the bus. This is because they expected the attorneys to work late hours regularly enough that paying for a spot was cheaper than paying for a car service. Admins never worked late. I switched jobs specifically because I hated being stuck at work late enough to be able to watch night games at PNC from my office window.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
In a dense urban center, someone is always going to need a ride.
If the demand for rides out of the urban center (in the morning) were as high as demand for a ride in, then we'd already see equal movement in both directions.
Well, no. They are only in motion if they have a fare already - this is what an algorithm would handle. Uber drivers have to roam the streets and try to chase the surge because they're humans earning a wage. With a fleet of autonomous vehicles, the unit economics of one particular vehicle don't matter, it's a very straightforward supply/demand matching algorithm at the broad market level. You'd end up having waves of fleet movement at something like a Metropolitan Statistical Area level.
You can algorithmically optimize things all you want, but in the end, it isn't really an improvement unless the car can find a fare relatively quickly and relatively close by. If it has to park downtown for any period of time, it's spending money rather than making money, and it's likely more money than a private commuter would pay for his car since he'd probably have a lease (and the pay structures of most garages make things even more complicated and expensive). If the car drives around to find fares, picks up a fare outside of downtown, or goes to a lot where it can park for free, it's contributing to traffic. Additionally, the optimization is only concerned with losing the least amount of money when the cars don't have passengers. Minimizing traffic doesn't play into the equation.
Consider the following scenario: A downtown area gets 20,000 commuter vehicles per day, and a garage costs $15/day on average. Assuming demand to leave downtown is minimal until later mid-afternoon, the optimal move is to simply have the cars drive around downtown. Perversely, if the cars are electric or hybrid (which they are usually assumed to be), it's in the interest of the car service to create as much traffic as possible. Since the bulk of the energy consumption only occurs when the cars are actually moving, it's best for the companies to ensure that the cars are stopped as much as possible. If people need to leave downtown during the day, then, well, there aren't enough of them to make it worth it to park the cars somewhere.
What does "contend" in this context mean?
Deal with the consequences of. Sitting traffic as a passenger isn't exactly much of an improvement when you're trying to get somewhere.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
The impression I got from OP was that he was referring to the benefits of privately owned autonomous vehicles and not necessarily a subscription model. In that case, you can't just eliminate parking and replace it with a dropoff area. And while that may work for something like a Wal-Mart where there's a lot of space, I don't see how you'd implement it in an area like a downtown where the nearest parking structure could be a block or more away from the destination. A business district where I live has a four lane road running down the middle, and with disturbing frequency I'll be stuck in a traffic jam because an Uber driver making a pickup has effectively eliminated a travel lane. I can't imagine a situation where this becomes the usual mode of travel.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.
Except all the cars in those lots are now on the road, with nobody in them. The streets are the new parking lots. This wouldn't be a good thing.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I already addressed this, but, aside from economic concerns, the biggest downside to this idea is that it would massively increase traffic. With few exceptions, cars only contribute to traffic when someone is actually trying to get from Point A to Point B. When I drive to work, I'm creating traffic between my house and my office, but after that my car is just sitting in the parking lot all day. If cars are a service I'm start creating traffic as soon as I summon the car, which now has to get to my house from wherever it is. And once I get to the office it's unlikely that there is going to be anyone here who happens to need a ride, so it now has to create more traffic while it either finds a passenger or heads back to home base.
Now consider a typical urban rush hour. All the cars that would normally just disappear into garages for the day are now driving around looking for fares. Or driving back out to lots in the suburbs. Now, in addition to the typical morning rush, we have to contend with a corresponding late-morning rush that consists entirely of empty vehicles. Imagine what it would be like if even a quarter of the cars that are currently parked were out on the street and you have an idea of what this would be like.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I think that if autonomous cars are ever widely adopted, the idea that they can also be a valet service will die pretty quickly. Imagine a typical Wal-Mart on a typical day. The vast majority of people park in an available space and walk to the store, then walk back out to their car. Now imagine if everyone were dropped off at the entrance. Now imagine if everyone summoned their car to the entrance as soon as they hit the checkout line. Now imagine both happening at once, all day, every day. The road in front of the entrance would be a nightmare. Now imagine that instead of the dropoff area being a private road with a large, adjacent lot, it's a public through street where the nearest parking is blocks away, and the cheapest parking is miles away. Imagine what an already busy downtown street would look like if 500 office workers all summoned their cars to pick them up at 5 after 5.
This is the kind of idea that sounds good when you assume the current traffic environment stays the same and you're the only one doing it. It changes greatly when everyone is doing it. If autonomous vehicles are ever widely adopted, I imagine there will be legislation prohibiting deadheading, with possible limited exceptions for people with disabilities.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
My vote is for stalemate. I had the misfortune of paying for the Tyson–Roy Jones, Jr. fight a couple years back, and it was the stupidest fight I've ever seen (and in today's world of boxing that says a lot). Tyson didn't look like he was even interested in winning, and in the end he said the important thing was the money it raised for his charity. Jake Paul was on an undercard and he looked like he was just flailing wildly, but I believe he won his fight against a retired NBA player. I'm of the opinion that Tyson is one of the most overrated boxers in history. He came up at a time when their wasn't any real competition (Trevor Berbick? Michael Spinks?!) and he was totally reliant on being able to knock a guy out early. When that didn't happen he was completely out of his element. The whole Evander Holyfield ear biting thing is a direct result of how he couldn't hang when he was losing.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I haven't seen the video yet, but I'd dismiss 2 or 3 outright as doomerism since no one knows what the legislative implications of autonomous vehicles will be. You might see areas with few pedestrians optimized for self-driving cars, but I doubt anywhere with significant foot traffic would see it. I've written elsewhere about the subscription model and why back-of-the-napkin math shows that it won't work out, at least not at any significant discount from owning your own vehicle. Just to give a relevant example without getting into too many specifics: The general idea is that most of a personal auto's useful life is wasted because it's sitting at home or in a parking lot. Thus, it would be more efficient if someone else could use your car when you aren't. The upshot is that no one will own their own cars when autonomous vehicles will make it possible for the car to take itself where it is needed automatically.
The problem is that trips aren't randomly distributed throughout the day. There's an initial peak during morning rush-hour that gradually fades throughout the late morning before rising again in the afternoon and peaking around 5:00. It then begins to taper again into the evening, and there is very little traffic overnight. Compound this with the fact that land use isn't uniform, either. Commercial offices are mostly located in city centers or their own office parks. Industrial sites are located in industrial parks, riverfronts, or other areas where they are relatively segregated from other uses. Commercial shopping and entertainment districts are located along their own strips in the suburbs. Downtown Pittsburgh has something like 5400 residents but 54,000 daily workers and visitors. Most of the residents specifically chose to live Downtown because it was easy to get to work. So every weekday you have a huge mass of cars coming in, but the number of people looking for a ride out of Downtown at 9 am on a Tuesday is vanishingly small. None of these cars will be able to find fares very easily, and it will be late in the afternoon before there is enough demand to get them out of Downtown.
So there are two options. The first is that they park all day until demand picks up, in which case we haven't solved anything. The other is that they leave and try to find fares elsewhere. This makes things worse; now we've got rush hours that run in both directions, full of cars deadheading out of town in search of fares or cheaper parking. Environmental costs aside, this is a dystopian traffic nightmare. Enact rules on deadheading and now you also have to pay the cost of parking the car and keeping it on standby all day, defeating the purpose of the service.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages.
It's amazing how the same armchair urbanists who decry mid-century urban renewal inadvertently champion some of its precepts when it suits their anti-car tastes. When downtowns were losing business to shopping malls, it became trendy to pedestrianize streets or even entire business districts. The traffic disruptions meant that roads on the perimeter needed to be widened to accommodate the additional traffic, and buildings along these roads were torn down for parking lots. Architectural critic Anthony Paletta has described this as "strangulation by ring road"; once the business districts were disconnected from the surrounding neighborhoods, they began to wither away. Crossing a 4 lane one-way ring road was a hassle for pedestrians, and the centers became havens for derelicts. Some of the more notable revivals have happened only after cities restored the commercial strips to through traffic.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
We don’t really have that here
Except we do. Minor league baseball teams have been controlled by their parent clubs since the 1920s, and exist specifically as developmental leagues for the majors. There's no similar arrangement between the NFL and college football. Given that the recent trends in college football have been toward maximizing the amount of money for all involved, there would be no real downside to colleges continuing to field older players if they thought it would make them more competitive. When you consider that most college players will never make the NFL, and that winning schools make more money, there are strong incentives toward a school keeping the best available players.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
A Moronically Detailed Explanation
Buckle up, because the answer is complicated. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a clear delineation between performers and songwriters. There were obvious exceptions like Duke Ellington, but writing and performing were considered separate roles. When recording, record labels would pair performers up with A&R men. The primary job of the A&R man was to select material for the performer, based on the performer's strengths and what they thought would sell. The repertoire largely came from American musical theater, and popular songs would be recorded by numerous artists. "Covers", as such, weren't really a thing in those days, as the earliest recorded version often wasn't the most well-known. For example "The Song Is You" is most associated with Frank Sinatra and his time with Tommy Dorsey, but it was first recorded ten years earlier. No one, however, thinks of the Sinatra version as a "cover" of a song by Jack Denny and the Waldorf Astoria Orchestra. Another way to think about it is that if the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra releases a new recording of Beethoven's Fifth next week, it won't be described as a cover of the Berlin Philharmonic's "original" 1913 recording. It's also worth noting that the heyday of the Great American Songbook was also the period when jazz was effectively America's Popular Music, and the focus wasn't so much on songwriting as it was on individual style and interpretation.
A critical factor in all of this is royalties. Every time a song is included on an album, played in public, played on the radio, etc., the songwriter gets a flat fee that is set by the Copyright Royalty Board. For example, if you record a CD the rate per track is 12.4 cents or 2.39 cents per minute of playing time, whichever is greater. So if a songwriter has a song included on an album that sells 40,000 copies, they'd get $4,960 in royalties. With the development of the album following WWII, the industry limited albums to ten tracks to keep royalty costs down. This is why the American versions of Beatles albums are significantly different than the British versions—the UK industry allowed 14 tracks. The Beatles hated this practice (and rebelled against it with the infamous "Butcher Cover"), and by 1967 they had enough clout to ensure that the American albums would be the same as the British albums.
The more important legacy the Beatles would have on the music industry was that they mostly wrote their own material. From the beginning, rock and roll musicians like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly had been writing their own material, but the Beatles were making the practice de rigeur. A&R men were now called producers and were beginning to take a more involved role in the recording process. Beginning in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was turning the new album format into a concept of its own. While most albums were simply collections of songs, Frank Sinatra had the idea to select and program the songs thematically to give the albums a cohesive mood. He also made sure his fans got their money's worth, and didn't duplicate material from singles. For the most part, though, albums remained an "adult" format, with more youth-oriented acts focusing on singles. While albums did exist, they were often mishmashes of miscellaneous material. A band didn't go into the studio to record and album; they went into the studio to record, and the record label would decide how to release the resulting material. The best went to single a-sides. Albums were padded with everything else—b-sides, material that didn't quite work, and, of course, covers recorded for the sole purpose of filling out the album. These would often be of whatever hits were popular at the time, and maybe a rock version of an old classic.
The Beatles and other British acts took up the Sinatra mantle of recording cohesive albums, but other musicians, particularly in the US, didn't have that luxury. The strategy of American labels in the 1960s was to shamelessly flood the market with product to milk whatever fleeting success a band had to the fullest extent possible. My favorite example of this trend, and how it interacted with the changing trends, is the Beach Boys. They put out their first studio album in 1962, 3 in 1963, and 4 in 1964. These were mostly short and laden with filler, but by the time of All Summer Long Beatlemania had hit and they were upping their game. As rock music became more sophisticated in 1965, Brian Wilson began taking a greater interest in making good albums, but Capitol still required 3 albums from them that year. By this time they were deep into Pet Sounds and didn't have anything ready for the required Christmas release. So they got a few friends into the studio to stage a mock party and recorded an entire album of lazy covers, mostly just acoustic guitar, vocals, and some simple percussion. It's terrible; even the hit single (Barbara Ann) is probably the band's worst. Two years later ripoffs like this were going out of fashion, but, with the band in disarray and no new album forthcoming, Capitol wiped the vocals from some old hits and released it as Stack-o-Tracks, including a lyric sheet and marketing it as a sing-along record. They were truly shameless.
During this period, there was still a large contingent of professional songwriters who specifically wrote for pop artists. The Brill Building held Carole King/Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill, Neil Diamond, and Bert Berns, among others. Motown had its own stable of songwriters to pen hits for its talent (and when they had to put together albums they covered other Motown artists' hits, Beatles songs, Broadway tunes, and whatever else was popular at the time). But times were changing. By the time Sgt. Pepper came out in 1967, rock bands were thinking of themselves as serious groups who played their own instruments, wrote their own material, and recorded albums as independent artistic statements. What criticism of rock existed was limited to industry publications like Billboard and teen magazines like Tiger Beat; the former focused on marketability and the latter on fawning adoration. Rolling Stone was launched in 1968 as an analog for what Down Beat was in jazz—a serious publication for serious criticism of music that deserved it. Major labels clung to the old paradigm for a while, but would soon yield to changing consumer taste. Even R&B, which largely remained aloof from this trend, saw people like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Isaac Hayes emerge as album artists in the 1970s.
This was the status quo that continued until the early 2000s. Pop music meant rock music, rock music meant albums, and albums meant cohesive, individual statements. Covers still existed throughout this period, but the underlying ethos had changed. If a serious rock band records a cover, there's a reason behind it. The decision to record the cover is an artistic one in and of itself, unlike in the 1940s, when you recorded covers because you had no other choice, or in the 1960s, when you recorded covers because the record company needed you to fill out an album. At this time, the industry itself was in a golden age, as far as making money was concerned. The introduction of the CD in the 1980s eliminated a lot of the fidelity problems inherent to analog formats. When they were first introduced, CDs were significantly more expensive to manufacture than records. But by the 1990s, the price of the disc and packaging had shrunk to pennies per unit. The cost of the disc itself was no longer a substantial part of the equation. And the increased fidelity led to increased catalog sales, as people, Baby Boomers especially, began repurchasing their old albums. These were heady times indeed.
And then Napster came along and ended the party. The industry spent the next decade flailing, going before congress, sued software developers, sued their own potential customers, and implemented bad DRM schemes, all in a vain attempt to stop the tidal wave. Music was no longer something you bought, but something you expected to get for free. After a decade of this nonsense, the industry finally did what it should have done all along and began offering access to a broad library for a reasonable monthly price. For once, it looked like there would be some degree of stability; profits went up, and piracy went down. Which brings us back to those royalties.
Earlier I gave an example where a songwriter gets paid a statutory fee for inclusion of a song on physical media. This doesn't work for streaming; if I buy a CD I pay the 12 cents but I have unlimited access to the song. Streaming works different because I technically have access to millions of songs, but the artist only gets paid for the ones I play. Paying them 12 cents a song doesn't make sense. So instead, streaming relies on a complicated formula involving percentage of streams compared with total revenue blah blah blah. The thing about royalties is, they come off the top. If a label releases an album with 12 songs by 12 different songwriters, none of whom have any relation to the label, that's $1.44 right there. But if the songwriter is also the performer under contract to the label, then the label can negotiate a lower songwriting royalty (these are called Controlled Compositions). But it gets better. Songwriting royalties don't go entirely to the songwriter, but are split between the songwriter and the publishing company. An artist signed to a label is probably required to use a publishing company owned by the label, so there's a 50% discount right there. A typical record contract grants a 25% discount on controlled compositions, so that $1.44 the label owes in royalties is down to 54 cents if the artist writes all his own songs.
In the world of streaming, where the royalties are paid every time a song gets paid, this can add up quick. There's no real downside to releasing a few covers for streaming as album tracks or as part of a miscellaneous release because the streaming totals aren't going to be that high. The problem comes when the recording becomes a hit; when there's a lot of money at stake, being able to recoup 62.5% of the songwriting royalties you'd otherwise have to pay means a lot of money. To be fair, most labels use outside songwriters to pen hits for their pop artists. But these songwriters are almost always affiliated with the publishers owned by the labels, and are thus cheaper on the whole than going out into the universe of available songs and picking one you like. The Great American Songbook existed in an entirely different world, where paying these royalties was an accepted fact of the industry. After the Rock Revolution, this was no longer the case, but the culture still existed, and the industry was making so much money that it didn't care. After 2000, extreme cost cutting became the norm, and songwriting royalties were an easy target in a world that had largely moved away from outside songwriters.
BTW I thought that "Fast Car" cover sucked. First, the song wasn't that good to begin with, and Tracy Chapman is possibly the most overrated singer-songwriter in history (aside from her two hits her material is the definition of generic). Second, a cover should try to reinvent the song in the performer's image. Here, it sounded like Luke was singing karaoke.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
What gives you the impression that Willie Brown was responsible for starting her political career? She dated him for about a year in 1994/1995, and she wasn't running for anything until 2003. She got a couple of apointments, but I don't think the Medical Assistance Commission and Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board are exactly known as incubators for top political talent. In any event, she hadn't served on either within five years of beginning her political career. It's also worth keeping in mind the actual dynamics of California politics at the time. By 2003 Willie Brown was viewed as corrupt, and any association with him was toxic. Her prior association with him was seen more as a liability than an asset. Take Willie Brown out of the equation, and there's nothing unusual about someone who's worked as a prosecutor for 13 years winning an election for District Attorney. There's nothing unusual about a District Attorney getting elected Attorney General.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
If it were as simple as just ending the Ukraine War then he would have done it already. Every peace proposal I've seen ends with Ukraine ceding massive amounts of territory and agreeing to never engage in any kind of security agreement. In other words, give up a bunch of shit now, and leave the door open for another invasion when Russia gets around to it. These terms wouldn't be acceptable to Ukraine, wouldn't be acceptable to Biden, and wouldn't be acceptable to Trump. If Biden tried to end the war on these terms Trump would immediately excoriate him for being weak, and he'd be right. I think Trump has deluded himself into thinking he can sweet talk Putin into a deal that would be acceptable to Ukraine, or at lease so reasonable that Ukraine would lose international support if they didn't take it. It would be great if it were true, but I think the end result of any peace talks would be Trump coming home in disgust and urging congress to send more military aid to Ukraine, possible including the kind of offensive weapons that Biden has been reluctant to give.
As for the National Parks, all of the ones that have been designated since Clinton have been scraping the bottom of the barrel. Take New River Gorge for example. I go there at least once a year, but there isn't a ton to do unless you're running the river. the park only owns up to the top of the hill in most places, which means that most of the park is a steep mountainside that isn't really suitable for any kind of development. There's an overlook at the main visitor's center, a short hike along the rim, and a couple old mining sites with varying degrees of accessibility and preservation (e.g. Thurmond is accessible by car and has a well-done museum, while Lower Kaymoor requires descending 800 steps to the bottom of the gorge on foot, and is just old mine structures). There's some climbing, and probably a few more things I'm not familiar with, but that's it. It works as a National River or Recreation Area but not so much a park.
The only large tract of Federal land that's an obvious location for a National Park is the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The problem is that this is owned by the Forest Service, and transferring it to the Department of the Interior would result in a bitch fight over timber rights, mining rights, and all the other mixed-use things that aren't allowed in National Parks. Even in New River Gorge, they limited the park to a minority of the available acreage so that hunting would be able to continue. Hence, it's technically New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, with the park itself only being about 8% of the total unit. National Park designations also require the approval of congress, which isn't going to happen. See the ongoing fight over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monuments, which can be created by executive order. They keep getting expanded and pared back, but neither area has anywhere near the facilities for congress to just designate a new park and be done with it.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.
I don't mean for her in particular but in general, though she was definitely bad at interviews. I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign. When one thinks of iconic campaign moments one thinks of iconic speeches, debate moments, commercials, etc. I am unaware of any iconic interview. Clinton had one in 1992, but that was during the primary, when exposure trumps everything else, especially for a dark horse like Clinton. In the general the only one I can think of was when Sarah Palin famously told Katie Couric that she reads all the newspapers and that she has foreign policy experience because Alaska is close to Russia. Not exactly what you're looking to get from an interview, though in fairness to the McCain campaign, Palin needed to do one because she was virtually unknown at the time she was tapped. There was also Jimmy Carter's famous Playboy interview, which is widely credited with tanking his support among Evangelicals. The rest of these, as voluminous as they are, seem to be forgotten. If you can think of an exception, I'd love to hear about it.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?
You may not like her personally, but some politicians (Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, etc.) have articles written about whether they're likeable enough to be president. People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.
Willie Brown
How was this exactly a skeleton. She dated the guy 30 years ago. He may have been technically married, but he'd been separated from his wife for a dozen years by that point; the relationship wasn't exactly a secret affair. Her "sleeping her way to the top" consisted of a couple appointments to state commissions nobody's heard of a decade before she ever ran for public office. In any event, it wasn't a big enough deal for the Trump campaign to make an issue of.
When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.
This is one of those things that could have gone either way. She could have distanced herself from her boss and repudiated his policies, saying that if she had been in charge she'd have done things differently. However, for her to suggest that Biden was a bad president would have been incredibly disloyal to the man who was more responsible than anyone for putting her in the position she's in. It would make the current administration look more dysfunctional than it already does. That's not a good look when you're running as an incumbent member of that administration. Furthermore, Biden isn't exactly Jimmy Carter. Inflation is down from where it was. The market is up. Unemployment is low. Illegal border crossings are comparable to Trump-era levels. To the outside observer it should look like the Biden administration faced significant challenges and met all of them. If there was any gaffe here, it was the failure to compare this to the Trump administration, which spent three years on easy mode and fell flat on its face as soon as it hit a major crisis (his response to which was largely to deny that a crisis even existed).
The argument here isn't that the Biden administration didn't make mistakes; it most certainly made several big ones. But while honesty may be the best policy when it comes to personal relationships, it's lethal in politics. If you want an example of an actual campaign gaffe, Mondale in 1984 said "Both of us are going to raise your taxes. The difference is that I'll admit it, he won't." Regan didn't end up raising taxes, but four years later Bush famously promised not to raise taxes, but raised them anyway. Bush won his election; Mondale didn't. I'm unaware of any politician in American history who has won reelection after owning the mistakes of his first term. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but if it did it's extraordinarily rare. I have seen plenty of politicians justify obvious mistakes and get rewarded for it.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?
It's an interesting question, especially insofar as any politicians have positive net approval ratings. Part of the problem is that a lot of well-liked politicians aren't that well-known (even if they're nationally known to people who pay any attention at all to politics). So, if by positive you mean that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of them, there is exactly one: Arnold Schwartzanegger, who has universal renown and a 59% approval rating, though a lot of this may have to do with his acting career. Number two is Trump, at 42%, also with universal recognition. If you adjust for recognition rate (and assume that those who have heard of the guy are representative of the country as a whole), Tim Scott is around 50% and Adam Kinzinger is at 65%. That's it for Republicans who have at least 50% recognition. While Scott may have a future in the party, Kinzinger's political career is pretty much over.
Just for comparison, I looked at Democrats, too. Jimmy Carter is the most popular at 61% with near-universal recognition. Others in the same boat are Obama at 59% and Harris at 54%. For those with less than Universal recognition we have Bernie Sanders (53% favorability), Liz Warren (52%), AOC (51%), Mayor Pete (54%), Cory Booker (53%), Tim Walz (55%), Gretchen Whitmer (53%), Hakeem Jeffries (56%), Mark Kelly (54%), Beto (51%), Amy Klobuchar (51%), Raphael Warnock (53%), Katie Porter (63%), Tammy Duckworth (55%), Jon Ossoff (58%), Jamie Raskin (55%), Claire McCaskill (55%), Jim Clyburn (51%), Sherrod Brown (52%), and Wes Moore (54%), plus a few others who are irrelevant. Some notable exceptions are Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, who are all below 50%.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
On Kamala the candidate: She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume. The downsides were that she had a reputation for being indecisive and carried the burden of a stillborn presidential primary campaign in which she said some things she would end up regretting. These aren't huge, though. All candidates have weaknesses, and she had fewer than most. I'm counting her invisibility during most of her vice-presidential tenure as neutral, because visibility can be a double-edged sword. Had she taken up some initiatives that were important to her but largely uncontroversial, it would have helped, but I don't think she intended on running for president again, so I don't fault her for not doing this.
On the campaign: She had a good ground game. She campaigned relentlessly in places where she needed to, and she didn't take any votes for granted. She didn't lean into unpopular rhetoric. There were no huge gaffes. She iced Trump in the debate, making him look like an incoherent old man. Most of the campaign criticisms she got are understandable, but ultimately unconvincing. She was certainly light on policy, but so was Trump, and it was pretty clear that the election wasn't going to be about policy. There was no reason to throw out bold proposals that might go over like a lead balloon. She didn't do many interviews, but I wrote about this before — the risks of her doing them outweighed the benefits. It's unlikely that anything she says on 60 Minutes is going to move the needle very far in her direction. If she does a good job it's just another boring political interview. If she does a bad job then it's news. No reason to risk it. Rogan's even worse because it's going to go 3 hours, probably veer far off-topic, and will be released unedited. There are a lot of things like this that you can argue she should have done differently, but they all would have been risky and with no certain payoff. She could have done a better job explaining the positions she took in the past and why she repudiated them.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
If we're talking the COVID vaccine, that ship has sailed. Bringing up 2021 policy concerns in 2026 isn't going to cost anyone their office. If you're talking vaccines in general, I doubt the antivax Republicans are large enough to primary anyone for any reason, let alone lack of a confirmation vote. And keep in mind that they only need a few Republican votes, and 13 GOP Senators won't be facing reelection until 2030. Ultimately, though, it won't matter, because Trump isn't even going to nominate the guy.
https://pennrecord.com/stories/650967918-jury-hands-down-near-1b-verdict-for-man-who-was-paralyzed-after-seatbelt-allegedly-failed
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