Prime, being of Irish heritage, was out with her clan yesterday instead of being stuck with a sober Jew. So I missed out on that chunk o’ fun and the inevitable bar fights. Instead, I stayed home and spent my Saturday working on a grant proposal. In the course of my career in science and technology, I’ve been handed some pretty strange stuff to do. But this weekend’s might be the best. The proposal is in the field of Sustainability, an area where I have no expertise and even less interest. “Here’s the paper we’re basing the proposal on, we need you to re-write it and redo any language in it which will catch the attention of the Anti-DEI screening software. Here’s a list of all the words we know which will get this proposal bounced even before review.” Unsaid was why DEI stuff was in a supposedly scientific paper in the first place…
Oh, I guess this is the part where I do birthdays, and today’s include a guy who wrote something that no-one read; a guy who was tempted but resisted; a guy famous as a wife-swapper; one of the heroes of the Progressive Left; a woman who drank because she got too much dick; a guy who was satisfied with being number two; the star of the very best Scorsese movie; the last intelligent liberal politician; and a guy who had the true Motown sound. I looked for some obscure chemists but couldn’t find any. Sorry, Pie.
And that leads us to Links.
Perhaps this could be solved by a mud-wrestling competition?
Why does this remind me of Mao?
Slate reminds us again what profound stupidity looks like.
“Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”
King Canute comes to mind. This is so amazingly laughable.
Geology is the same as being in the Klan. You can’t make this shit up.
I had something else picked out for Old Guy Music today but then stumbled across this. Only In America.
Prime, being of Irish heritage, was out with her clan yesterday instead of being stuck with a sober Jew.
Impossible. You’re not sober. :-p
That was my thought.
ReALiTy hAs A LiBerAl bIAs!
Happy birthday George Floyd?
Happy birthday Thomas Cranmer?
I was going to guess Chris Difford.
Happy birthday Robert Wagner?
Too soon!
That one was just a gimme by the Old Man, honestly.
Argh… threading makes that too confusing. The “tempted but resisted” was really easy (with the correct answer… not Mr. Floyd!) was my intended statement. Thanks, WordPress!
My gut reaction is because “Sustainability” while it should be an objectively neutral “good idea” has been conflated to Communism for the most part. Camel nose for “Net Zero” and “Racial and Societal Equity” and whatnot.
Were those really bad looking donuts or bagels oddly food colored to be green on the front page? Either way — “edible” was not my first adjective to mentally apply to them…
Morning and thanks as always for the links, OMWC. Morning all.
Sustainability presupposes a zero sum world view. It is not objectively neutral.
That’s one way to look at it. “Not strip mining all the resources for short term gain” was more my thought — more of a “how do we make this last through the long term until we can transition to harder-to-get or alternative resources” type thing. That’s just plain common sense (at least in my worldview).
Because they want to wrap the omnicause in with Science! to give it more respectability than it deserves.
Because on Day One Joe commanded the insertion of DEI into every corner of the federal government and made it the Number One priority.
Y’all should stop wasting y our time trying to figure out what progressives are talking about, what they mean etc.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
No matter what is coming out of their mouths, every time, they are saying the same thing: “Give me your money and do as I tell you”
Sustainability can be assessed on a first order basis by asking if something is profitable, that is, whether it generates more value than it consumes.
Generally, in ProgSpeak, doesn’t “sustainability” mean some sort of perpetual motion machine? Some sort of set-it-and-forget-it mechanism of farming or manufacture or electricity or anything people work at that pulls magic unicorn farts out of the air and spins them into food, iPhones, and air conditioning?
At its best it means one process’s waste becomes input for a new process. Like co2 from animals becomes food for plants which creates oxygen for animals. But yes it has become what you stated.
No, not air conditioning. See, that stuff is bad, as the Euro’s don’t have it.
yes, quite; this is key: the two primary constituents of any prog thought are
a) must be pretty, preferably showered in flowers
b) must require no sacrifice: no effort, no cost, no energy
Therefore, to have money requires no effort or savings or sacrifice; to have energy requires no drilling or spills or broken arms or leveled mountains or piles of slag; to have materials requires no leveled forest or fouled stream.
We get better every day; we can approach this ideal more closely with each innovation. The only instantaneous way to pacify Gaia is, of course, to murder 8 billions of people or so.
a guy who wrote something that no-one read;
Happy birthday to all the Links compilers!
:blinks:
:blinks again…:
BOOOOO!!!
(We do at least try to hover, Ted!)
try to hover
Identifying as a helicopter?
BOOOO!
Signed: confirmed hoverer, occasional clicker, more occasional reader (beyond first paragraph).
Actually I should amend that, since helicopters do hover, and only trying would imply being an Osprey.
Happy Birthday Moses? (Though it helps when you don’t smash your first draft when your audience has shifted their attention to another idol, granted…)
Yes! Got that one… :Snoopy dance:
I was going to guess Mary Tyler Moore.
So, Teds is including Dick with a Dyke.
Ha! I was going to go with Moses as well, but figured he wrote enough stuff people did read to make up for it (even after accounting for those other 5 commandments we don’t talk about)
I tried to read that Guardian article, but it just wouldn’t get to the point.
Something about obsession with obsidian?
They have an avowed political position?
I don’t have a problem with collateral damage in principle. Shit happens, war is hell, etc etc. Just make sure the conflict you’re engaging is worth killing children over. Rival goatfuckers having it out over a patch of dirt nobody gives a shit about doesn’t rise to that level for me.
So does this mean we are supposed to give the color of the rocks in the box when we compare someone’s intelligence to them? Do the rocks have to match the color of the person we’re insulting? Science is so great! Every answer raises new questions!
“Geological knowledge helped build plantations and mines, extracting valuable resources while creating a geotrauma for black and Indigenous populations.”
Right, geotrauma…go fuck yourself lady.
Geotrauma would be a great band name. The first album cover needs to be an image of the planetary collision that formed the Moon.
https://images.radio-canada.ca/v1/ici-info/perso/terre-lune-formation-collision-representation-artistique.jpg
Interesting that “black” was uncapitalized while “indigenous” got a capital letter.
And as if there’s never been “geotrauma” for White people.
Pompeii was Gaia’s wrath for what future western societies would eventually do.
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where paradise lay?
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
Since geotrauma isn’t actually a thing, I don’t think white (or black or indigenous) people have ever suffered from it.
“Since geotrauma isn’t actually a thing…” – they weren’t big cars, but I bet people hit by them still experienced some trauma. Probably some people even experienced trauma simply driving a Geo.
Heh, my mom had one for a while. My friends affectionately referred to it as “the blood clot.”
Look, the professor of inhuman geography knows what she is talking about.
(I love how the Guardian slips that past its commie readership without, apparently, any need for an explanation for what the fuck that is supposed to be.)
Like gain of function research in crappy security labs, mass experimentation on the populace, dramatically increasing authoritarianism and attempted technocratic rule and belittling anyone who dares to question your methods, your data or your experiments?
Those sorts of phenomenal things you puppy torturing asshole?
And it made me think less of Mao and more of the Atlanta airport “exhibits” in the moving sidewalk / escalator areas where they know they have a captive audience. Of course… that may just say something about the folks managing Hartsfield.
An idea can be phenomenally bad and still be phenomenal, so technically correct, I guess.
It did phenomenal things for him no doubt, he got a pretty sweet retirement out of it but science, of course, has done great things. Now do a message on ethics.
Fauci….yeah. Check out his colleague, that He dude mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
…and knew who must be obeyed! 👍
“Not throwing infinite money into a completely unaccountable and unauditable bureaucracy” == “NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!! ARGLE BARGLE BLAAAGH!”
Interesting take there statists… You have managed to one-up the “If government doesn’t do it, no one will…” with “If government doesn’t do it and the President himself can’t know how they do it or justify their budget….”. Bold strategy.
Looks like more of Shepard Fairey’s one-note shit to me. Talk about having one idea your entire creative life and milking it to the bitter end. Imagine how creatively impotent you’d have to be actually copy that art style. It’s no wonder they shit their pants every time somebody proposes killing the National Endowment for the Arts.
Oh hey! Im in the middle of a big bike race, huhhh
Yusuf confirmed as a racist.
Thats Race est,
He likes to ride his bicycle….
There are worse things to ride….
Worse things to ride….
bicycle, tricycle, automobile, a bow legged woman and a ferris wheel …
Re: ISS — I think part of the answer historically was “flexibility”. You could get a lot of potential experiments over time that it would be infeasible to send up multiple robot missions for with them locked in. Given the expanded programmability, that may no longer be true — though I would personally still think it is. We still have more local computing power and adaptability over time.
And given I’m still firmly in the camp of “We need to get off this rock eventually” (for the good of the species, because I’m unconvinced we’re not a fluke of nature and very rare in the cosmos [I’m still in the Rare Earth camp when it comes to things… Luna’s formation, magnetic fields, dino-killer disrupting what had otherwise been stable for millions of years, etc] and we might as well use our corner of space, etc. — there’s some value in long term habitation data, I would think. LEO isn’t the best place for what we’ll really need to know long term — but it is a start and the best we would get out of NASA in the Shuttle era. (Looking forward to Starship and the like getting us past that again).
– Albert Scott Crossfield
I’m searching my memory, but in the numerous science fields I’ve worked in (polymers, electrochemistry, glass, ceramics, electronics, surface science, toxicology, synthetic silicon chemistry), not a single one seems to have been enhanced by work done on the ISS. Maybe someone else has an idea of what I might have missed outside my specialties?
The current experiment studying long term health effects of cronyism in government contract awards has important implications for future space projects.
That’s surprising to me, actually. I thought there were specific experiments in recent memory in crystallization, polymers and maybe transitor lithography (I swear I remember some reporting on “chip manufacture that affects the layers” experiment somewhere). Not doubting you — and very much keeping in mind the “If you know anything about a field you know how shitting the ‘reporting’ on it is” — just saying I thought they’d be doing experiments in at least some of those areas.
Of course — maybe they did those experiments, they were completely redundant and added nothing to the fields in question. No idea.
I’d apologize for speaking completely out of my hindquarters — but this is a chat forum website on the Internet… no one should expect anything less!
Stuff gets done and published with much nodding to microgravity. Actual impact and novelty? Nah. And nothing that couldn’t have been done better robotically.
But… Velcro. Oh wait, that was before space.
The only example that somewhat crossed my path was just an enormous scam, see Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center.
I would have thought most experiments would be on biological changes, limitations, and effects on mammals and other creatures. The goal being learning how to best prepare for long journeys in near weightlessness (using freefall to replicate). Crystal in “zero g” growth was the big promise back in the 1980’s. Today on earth we grow nearly flawless single crystals of Si and other semiconductors in huge boules allowing 200mm and larger wafers.
Also it’s currently held together with chewing gum and baling wire. You need them to keep the thing together.
My understand is maintenance takes a lot of time that should be whatever useless “science” time should.
I was fully expecting the comparison to be a German Panzer, but I suppose that might have been too on the nose even for the retards at Slate.
Slate? Like they know what a panzer is? Shirley you’re joking
I would expect a reasonable proportion of them are anime fans. So that would help them.
I’m not sure if Slate is as proudly stupid as they are shamelessly evil.
“Proudly”? Profoundly. WTF
“Proudly”? Profoundly. WTF
Works either way really.
I thought “proudly” worked just fine.
And they kick off the article with a picture of a vehicle which looks nothing at all like a Cybertruck.
I was thinking the same thing.
wrote something that no-one read
Happy birthday Thomas Pynchon!
-The story of the Casspir, which patrolled townships in South Africa when the Tesla CEO was a boy.
Looks nothing like it actually. A textbook article on how to actually do libel without legally doing libel. These people just cannot really believe what they’re writing down.
Well, thanks for reawakening that memory… (I know, I know… my free associative mind just works oddly some mornings… but I’m betting I’m not alone here…)
“These people just cannot really believe what they’re writing down.”
It is performance art. Or insanity. Or both.
Predators are hiding behind Pride
What the fuck was a 12-year-old doing on Grindr? The poor kids’ parents (yeah, right, pull the other one) should be publicly flogged for this shit…
Predators are hiding behind Pride.
Ya’ don’t say.
WTF does “Pride” exist for anymore other than to hide these fucking creeps? I’ve been to my share of those sordid exercises in “look how transgressive I am!” and they serve no useful purpose other than to attract leftist politicians looking to shore up this part of their coalition.
Yeah, that was the whole point in turning what used to be a mental issue into a “sexual orientation”. I am beyond sick of this shit.
Ugh. Why did the dedthread die while I was posting? This is what happens when you try to monkeywrench your sleep cycle…
I need more coffee, and I can’t have any. Fuck.
Cant? What is this word?
Blood pressure. My doc is limiting me to one cup a day. It sucks.
Ook,
/ kicks pebble in sadness
My doc is limiting me
How much Glib time is he allowing you?
Coffee is among the substances I’m not supposed to drink after my most recent visit to the ER (subsequent to an eight-day stay in hospital). But it’s not a great loss as I only drank it for the caffeine. Ditto the alcohol.
I do miss greasy fried food.
And I do wish I could partake of some of the delicious drinks and foods frequently described on this site. But I know what might happen should I indulge or imbibe. Agonizing lingering pain after each swallow is not something I want to experience again.
You drank alcohol for the caffeine?
I’m starting to get over my caffeine addiction, and losing the tension headaches has been nice. But I also love the taste of coffee, I love the zen-like ritual of doing a proper pour-over, I just love coffee culture in general.
If I switch to decaf, don’t tell anyone, okay?
Your secret is safe with us.
People, people, check out the music! This was crazy fun.
But it’s the Grateful Dead!
I kid, that was fun.
Oh, that was wonderful! That song is a sentimental favorite, and this rendition did not disappoint in the slightest. I’ll be sure to share it with TT. Thanks! (I’ll have you know I paused my Sunday morning choral music show on SXM to listen, and it was more than worth it!)
That is still my favorite Greatful Dead song. It was a great version. There are so many less limitation to making and recording music. My friend has been making his own music this way for several years with a simple set up in his basement. He plays all of the instruments, sings, records, and mixes all while sitting on his couch.
“In July of 2023, a South Florida jury awarded $800,000 in damages to the family of then-4-year-old Olivia Caraballo for the second-degree burns she suffered when a hot Happy Meal Chicken McNugget fell in her lap in 2019.”
https://nypost.com/2025/03/15/us-news/jury-awards-man-50-million-in-starbucks-hot-tea-spill/
So no more hot food?
You didn’t catch my link on the NOAA research about the release of volatile organic compounds from cooking (not just using gas)? Cooking is destroying the environment!!!
I’ll say about this the same things I said about the OG McDonalds verdict:
– Neither case was a cash grab – both plaintiffs did suffer real, severe injuries.
– Both companies had some provable culpability (McDonalds brewed their coffee undrinkably hot to disguise the taste of the cheap shitty beans they used, and Starbucks apparently can’t train their milk dispensers to correctly use a beverage tray.)
– Both companies are getting advertising out of these cases that they couldn’t buy at twice the price – our beverages are hot! When you roll up at McStarbucks, you will *not* be getting a crappy lukewarm cup of whatever. If you’re clumsy, you might want to skip the drive-thru…
Yeah, and then tort reformers use these exceedingly rare “runaway jury” or “jackpot verdict” cases to made it nearly insurmountably difficult for plaintiffs to sue unless
– Neither case was a cash grab – both plaintiffs did suffer real, severe injuries.
Not going to comment on the propriety of either case other than a baseline level of suspicion as I haven’t paid a lot of attention.
But having suffered a real, sever injury does not, in and of itself, preclude the suit being a cash grab. There’s no casual connection between severity of injury and culpability on the part of the named defendant.
Apparently my I fat fingered my touchpad and hit “submit.” That was going to conclude: “to make it nearly insurmountably difficult for plaintiffs to sue unless they’re already sitting on Scrooge McDuck money to demonstrate direct damages.”
@PutridMeat, the OG hot coffee McDonalds, the lady just wanted them to pay for her medical bills (~$60k????) and they refused. So she sued. Her genitalia were pretty much fused.
lady just wanted them to pay for her medical bills (~$60k????) and they refused.
Again, not really relevant to culpability. Poor business decision? Maybe. Not ‘nice’? Maybe. Justifying a system whereby the one with money is responsible for all consequences downstream from the point where you purchased their product? Definitely not.
Maybe there was negligence on the part of McDonald’s and they should have been liable (and willing to pay up front) for the woman’s medical bills – I’m not commenting on that. But the mere fact that she suffered real and severe injuries and just wanted her medical bills covered shouldn’t make McDonalds liable for said bills.
“Neither case was a cash grab – both plaintiffs did suffer real, severe injuries.”
Sorry, but a second degree burn is not a severe injury. At the very most, the companies should have covered the urgent care bill. As far as spilled drinks go, who spilled the damn drink? If a server dumps on you, maybe I could see tagging the company. If you dump it on yourself, well, who’s fault is that?
the OG hot coffee McDonalds
McD’s didn’t put the cup between her thighs, she did.
Isn’t that kind of what comparative negligence and jury trials themselves are meant to address?
The fact of the matter is that the party with a billion dollar capitalization, insured by a company with a 100 billion dollar capitalization, will force all but the most blatant cases to litigation to bleed out the plaintiff’s substantially more limited resources (even the most high profile plaintiff’s lawyers have a budget, and the actual plaintiff is on the hook for those costs if they lose), in order to prevent precedents under which other plaintiffs might successfully sue them. That’s just how the incentives are set up. Sometimes juries do go off their nut and say “You shouldn’t have been an asshole, why didn’t you just accept responsibility and pay this guy’s medical bills? We award a gajillion dollars in compensatory and punitive damages.” Which will almost always get overturned on appeal or by the trial judge anyway. And we act like it’s some kind of travesty the one time in a thousand they get in snapped off in their bunghole when a sympathetic victim meets a cooperative jury.
Check out Dean here….”Who’s fault is that?”
Like that has anything to do with it.
And we act like it’s some kind of travesty the one time in a thousand they get in snapped off in their bunghole when a sympathetic victim meets a cooperative jury.
It is a travesty. A sympathetic “victim” meeting a cooperative jury does not create responsibility on the part of the rich, insured party. It might reflect true negligence and misbehavior on the part of said party, or it may reflect typical greed and envy on the part of plaintiff and jury.
Pointing out problems with the system putting barriers to the ability to redress grievances without making a bunch of lawyers rich, running out the clock and finances of truly injured parties – with the clear parallels in the criminal legal system – does not justify ascribing legal liability someone or some company in cases where they shouldn’t be held liable for someone else’s actions. Try to fix those problems and I’ll be right with you. It’s always been one of the uncertainties I’ve had with libertarian philosophy resorting to “tort law will address that”; I’ve used it myself albeit with some underlying trepidation (“really? will it?” under my breath). When you see the systems that grow up around tort law – and criminal law – that stack the deck against people not in the system, it’s sort of difficult to use that argument.
As an aside, set-it-and-forget-it libertarianism is a serious failure point. The way that the US constitution was originally set up should have been a libertarian paradise, but humanity, being what it is, constantly set about fucking with that, and this is what we end up with; some sort of Progressive way station, with half of the population wanting the train to go full speed into the blind corner, and the other half throwing ropes around it in some sad effort to stave off the coming wreckage.
That is the same logic in saying “bob shot his kid with a .45 when drunk, Colt is responsible.”
Zwak: I repeat….1% of the human population makes everything we have. The other 99% go around in circles handing each other pieces of paper or are running some kind of scam.
Watch TV sometime and take note of the ads. For each ad ask yourself ‘What would the world be like without that?’.
In spite of ourselves the US is the most fantastic success in history or, as Clemens said “America is the worst country, except for all of the others.”
Bob’s kid was shot by a Colt
keep it passive voice, please, if you want the liability to accrue properly!
That’s essentially question begging though. The purpose of a jury trial in a civil case is to determine liability, and the degree thereof. Sometimes that’s going to result in bad verdicts, the same way as it does in criminal trials such as the infamous OJ Simpson verdict. That some guilty criminals go free and some plaintiffs who share responsibility for their injuries get big tort awards is the price of having a court system. It’s rarely as cut and dried in these cases as “the plaintiff stuck his hand in a bucket of sulfuric and then tried to use home depot for selling him the bucket.” If McDonald’s thinks it bears no responsibility for selling scalding hot beverages to someone who spilled one on themselves, and the plaintiff thinks they bear no responsibility for spilling a beverage they should probably have known was scalding hot all over themselves, and they can’t reach an amicable resolution short of a jury trial, they’re both risking the jury assigning their culpability on a spectrum of 0 to 1, and awarding damages accordingly. It’s not a travesty when the system functions as it’s designed to and you happen to disagree with the conclusion reached by 12 retards who couldn’t get out of jury duty.
“The fact of the matter is that the party with a billion dollar capitalization, insured by a company with a 100 billion dollar capitalization, will force all but the most blatant cases to litigation to bleed out the plaintiff’s substantially more limited resources”
Pat, as someone who worked for a hospital with a captive insurance company, I can say with confidence that you’re wrong. We would settle a small handful of claims before a legal complaint was filed (and we routinely offered to). Some of these were substantial settlements, too. But generally, yes, the plaintiff would file a complaint, and we would go through some level of discovery to test and determine the value of their claim. The money this cost us was just as green as the money we would pay as damages, of course. The plaintiff, on the other hand, was spending a nickel – their law firms work on contingency, so it was their lawyers who were paying for the litigation.
We could generally get a good idea of the value of a case pretty early, as we had to establish reserves at our captive insurance company. And I settled most cases for around that value. The handful that we took to trial we either won outright, or the damages were less than we had offered in settlement before trial.
At no point did we ever adopt, nor do I know of a company or insurer that had, a strategy of “bleed the plaintiffs white and they will go away.” To the contrary, the more the plaintiff lawyer has invested in the case, the higher the settlement they need to cover their costs.
Should be “the plaintiff was not spending a nickel”.
It’s not a travesty when the system functions as it’s designed to and you happen to disagree with the conclusion reached by 12 retards who couldn’t get out of jury duty.
I’m fine with casting it this way and having that discussion about trade-offs, whether a better system could be derived, etc. However, I’m not fine with casting it as “billion dollar capitalization and heavily insured company” and ending with “hard to get upset when they get it up the bunghole”.
Didn’t the McD’s lady pull the lid off with the coffee between her thighs while driving to mix in cream/sugar? I remember reading some piece about it after the fact, that was supposed to make me feel bad for the “burn victim” that actually had me even more pissed at the stupidity of that verdict.
probably….but stupidity is often still foreseeable
As someone who spent the first 12 months of a 38 month long medmal suit just trying to establish which of the 3 different active legal entities operated by the relevant medical group (out of 6 total entities that had operated during the relevant time period, the rest of which had been dissolved, acquired, or merged) was, in fact, the properly insured party to the suit, I’d just say it’s variable, and not every megacorp operates with the same set of ethical standards. By the time that lawsuit was finally settled, the relevant medical group had restructured again, changed its trade name for the 4th time in 5 years, and the entity for which the insurance company wrote the settlement check no longer existed.
Well, more accurately, the plaintiff is borrowing against any potential award, whether by settlement or trial. If no such award comes to fruition, the plaintiff’s assets are fair game for the plaintiff’s attorney to recover their costs. And that’s what I mean when I say the plaintiff is more budget-limited. No attorney with a brain in his head is going to come out of pocket for more than he can potentially collect out of the plaintiff’s assets if he loses, and will have assigned a probability value to the case ahead of time. Insured parties are not similarly constrained; it’s basic moral hazard. Insurance, like interest lending, was outlawed in the pre-industrial world for that reason.
That’s true, but once discovery has laid bare the financial position of the plaintiff, it’s not particularly difficult to sweet-spot the number at which it would be more advantageous for them to settle than gamble on a trial that will necessitate even further costs that a jury award short of a jackpot might not fully cover. That’s pretty much how I got my mom a low 5 figure net settlement out of a mid 6 figure offer at mandatory pre-trial arbitration, because after 3+ years of accumulated costs there was very little chance of a favorable jury verdict garnering a better outcome since the state in which the suit took place has capped non-economic damages, and my dad’s estate and lost earnings were too small for the actual economic damages to cover the additional $100k+ dollars in costs to go to trial.
And don’t mistake that as an endorsement of plaintiff’s attorneys. The shitbag who handled that case for me is one of the biggest pieces of shit I’ve ever worked with in my entire life. He offered me a job as a paralegal a few months after our business concluded, which would have been a life-changing career move, but I turned it down because I’d rather die broke than work for somebody like that.
Fair enough, McDonald’s is as entitled to your sympathy as my ambivalence when they took it in the ass gambling on a trial and lost. Settling for medical expenses, or splitting the baby and paying the plaintiff’s insurance deducible, probably seemed like a smarter move in hindsight, and all the fucks I had left to give about international megacorporations having to pay jury verdicts when the system didn’t go their way ran out a dozen or so federal bailouts and captured regulatory agencies ago.
I’ll admit I am not as well versed in the intricacies of the contracts plaintiffs lawyers hang on their clients. It’s an adversarial system (again . . .”except for all the others”), and I know it sucks for all involved. The one thing the legal system has that is pro-defendant is that it is built for delay, and that’s not a small thing.
Yes, the insurers and defendants aren’t sympathetic to claimants, but that comes from long, hard experience with grifters, crooks, and people who have the “gimme dat” attitude because hey, “billion dollar companies, what do they care”, and “they’re insured, aren’t they?”. The number of fraudulent and bullshit nuisance claims will make anybody jaded.
“No attorney with a brain in his head is going to come out of pocket for more than he can potentially collect out of the plaintiff’s assets if he loses, and will have assigned a probability value to the case ahead of time.” Well, yes and no. The incentives are complex, here, many of them subjective/reputational. Otherwise, we would have settled a lot more cases before discovery (which is expensive) was wrapped up, while the lawyer didn’t have much in the case.
“Insured parties are not similarly constrained; it’s basic moral hazard.”
We spent, on average, 80% as much on defense as we did on damages, which is pretty much the industry average. I think you are letting the “they have lots of money” cloud your judgment on this. The industry reputation for being tightwads extends internally as well as externally – case costs and damage payouts are flyspecked. Nobody spends a million dollars to defend a $100K claim, in the hope that the plaintiff just gives up. Insurance has its own constraints, believe me.
McDonald’s is as entitled to your sympathy
Dead thread and all, but I don’t want to go out to the garage and work my wood just yet. It’s cold out there.
I have no sympathy for McDonald’s. Nor apathy. That’s entirely the point. Is McDonald’s responsible for the injury sustained by this person and, if so, to what degree? It should not be a question of sympathy or apathy either way. If I make a judgement based on what this party to the suit may or may not have done in the past in areas completely unrelated to the specifics of the current question or how sympathetic and able to tug my emotions this party is, we are no longer dealing with questions of responsibility and/or justice, but treading into vengeance, greed, and envy or, at the very least, opening ourselves to those being the primary metrics and justification of the civil legal system.
Jury trials are lie their cousin, elections – the worst system except for all the others. Almost everything depends on where your trial is held. Some jurisdictions, you’ve got a shot at getting a good jury. Others, and the plaintiffs bar knows them, oh yes they do, every jury thinks they are sitting to hand out lottery tickets. Oddly, there are virtually no jurisdictions that break the other way.
Most juries don’t really think very hard about contributory negligence or proximate cause or any of that stuff. They tend to think about two things: “who pissed us off during the trial”, and depending on that comes out, “how big a check should we hang on the defendant”. They work backwards from those to fill out the form in the jury room. All sorts of legal doctrines that sound like they are protective of the defendant are effectively dead letters – either judges don’t enforce them, or juries don’t bother with them. As far as judges go, they know that the plaintiffs bar invests large sums of money in judicial elections, so reach your own conclusions on them.
NJ has an appointed bench and I can explain the issues with that intimately having family that sat on the bench.
I live in crime central county and get jury summons frequently compared the rest of the US. I’m ready to make a 13th amendment argument with the way NJ treats jurors.
On the civil side I have seen first hand both sides absolutely purposely do evil because they can. My experience 60 / 40 plaintiff being the bigger asshole. Big corp and big insurer are no angels.
Insurers knowingly fuck over claimants with small claims that are uneconomic to retain counsel. And even at that point I who know the system well have had PD claim drag on for over 30 days. Funny how retaining dates, times, conversions and no responses over a period of a month gets you a check in 48 hours when you say “bad faith”.
Fuck everyone in our civil justice system.
I have a sample size of one, the jury I was assigned to on a civil case. I was not impressed with the plaintiff’s case at any point during the trial. And you are right about which attorney pissed me off; at closing the plaintiff’s attorney made reference to To Kill a Mockingbird in a way that made me think he thought we were prejudiced goobers. When we started deliberations, in my head I was wondering if I would be the lone holdout and was pleasantly surprised when we were basically unanimous in the first poll – no one bought the bullshit.
I forgot it was St. Paddys, as I always do. Speaking as a schmuck with substantial Irish ancestry and sharing a name with the saint whom the holiday once represented, I say fuck Ireland, and this holiday in the modern context is retarded. Adults don’t need an excuse to drink on a Sunday, and Ireland is, was, and forever will be a shithole with or without Christianity and snakes. I’m going to drink American Bourbon and British gin just to spite Ireland. Green still remains my favorite color, though.
A holiday invented in America by those who had expatriated out of the motherland. See also Cinco de Mayo.
Ah yes! Shitty beer day!
5/5
So Drinko day O’Mayo, as opposed to Drinko de Mayo.
Exactly. Which makes it even more retarded. As if a third of the population fled the country over the course of 3/4 of a century because they were tired of the rain or something.
Oh the joys of British rule.
I’m largely Irish on my Mom’s side, and I broadly agree with you. Ireland is a shithole (to the point where great-gran Edna and family emigrated to fucking New Jersey,) and St. Patrick’s Day is amateur night.
Yes. The two nights to stay home and drink are St. Pats and new years eve. Too many amateurs out.
BTW, one birthday I didn’t mention: Prime. Please offer her congratulations, sympathy, and bemusement.
Does she go by 3? Or the formal 3.14159?
Imagine reaching her age and lacking the discernment to pal around with one of this crowd of miscreants.
She’s actually met four Glibs (other than me) and had a fine time. I’m still trying to line up a trip to hang out with SugarFree…
Is she too old for you now?
Isn’t everyone?
Ah yes! Shitty beer day!
5/5
More UN lies about Israel
I expect nothing less from the UN.
Sure, tell me another one AP!
After Columbia arrests, international college students fall silent
It’s nice to see such concern about chilling effects from the same sort of neo-fascist clowns who spent the last decade and a half screeching that it’s fine to punch Nazis, with “Nazi” defined as anyone to the right of Pol Pot.
+1 Misgendering!
That screeching isn’t the sound of a principle suddenly engaging inside their minds – it is the raw emotion of ONLY WE GET TO DO THAT.
Ah, so there is some good news.
“Some say they are familiar with government crackdowns but never expected them on American college campuses.”
Well, unless you were a Jew, or, as pointed out above, to the right of Pol Pot.
Well, international college students aren’t supposed to be here to make noise. There’s supposed to be here to study, get a degree, that kind of thing.
You are correct OMWC, you cant make that shit up…at least not without special training. I need to go check the curriculum at Columbia School of Journalism. I expect to find expert level classes in Making Shit Up and Non-Sequitur Construction.
In what way exactly does the Tesla truck look like the armored vehicle pictured? Racist rocks? All enlightenment thought is racist.
I think the vast majority of leftism is like the show with the cackling hens….just performance art. They dont believe any of the shit they say.
Mengele Is apparently this guy’s spirit animal.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lPEw5SSHVWU
I was expecting one of the child mutilation monsters but the culprit is no surprise. He is from a shit culture that has zero respect for individuals.
Nice that the NAACP finally seems concerned with black on black crime.
Virginia teen track runner who bashed opponent’s head with baton rallies supporters after getting assault charge
I wonder if the reaction would have been different if the alleged attacker had been a White girl?
I’m valiantly ignoring this story despite the media insisting I pay attention and this shit is exactly why.
“Prime, being of Irish heritage, was out with her clan yesterday instead of being stuck with a sober Jew.”
Who is this sober Jew of whom you speak, anyway?
It’s a fictional character.
As for reading links I always try to read at least one paragraph but the racist rocks idiocy…I couldn’t look away. I fear my IQ may have dropped a bit after reading that.
*Yeah, I know, didnt have far to fall blah blah
“a guy who wrote something that no-one read”
Happy Birthday terms-of-service author!
St. Paddy’s Day T&A.
https://archive.is/NaRZf
Slutty Sunday.
Lawsuit plods on with Cunty Aunt Susie “compromising” by putting a for-sale sign in the yard one whole month! before she said she would, as long as we withdraw the motion*. This happened because Cunty Aunt Millie got served (as the roommate—we believe that is to curtail squatter’s rights claims). I would guess this is the reason Susie folded minutely. She is taking the realtor over to see Mom on Tuesday, so that’s progress.
*I laughed. She’s still entertaining some delusion that she’s in charge and is giving up a great deal “compromise” and mom needs to be grateful. I told Mom to tell her that the sooner Susie puts the sign up, the sooner the motion gets withdrawn, so it she wants the legal stuff to go bye-bye, she’ll do what she’s been told to do.
Also, I am not to refer to Cunty Aunt Susie as Cunty Aunt Susie in Mom’s presence. 😤
Also, I am not to refer to Cunty Aunt Susie as Cunty Aunt Susie in Mom’s presence – I have every confidence in your literary ability to find suitable alternatives
Coozey Aunt Susie it is then.
Perfidious Gash?
IANYL, but I wouldn’t withdraw the motion until at a minimum you have a sales contract, and probably not until the sale closes. its just as easy to take a sign down as it is to put it up.
I was on that, but then I had thought listing would be sufficient. I’ll ask my lawyer what he thinks.
This day in “Pie’s magnolia.” The frost nest week will probably mess it up but thems be the breaks.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/AAN8GFza8VErnXMj6
Pretty.
do you have magnolias in the US?
Yes, it’s even on the Mississippi state flag.
it’s on the latest flag of Mississippi, even
magnolia, kudzu, privet……not meant for this lovely land
I thought Georgia was the state that kudzu swallowed
Although I could see how Mississippi could be to, considering their similar latitudes and climates.
a lot of GA is karst, less than ideal for kudzu
whereas MS is ideal from curb to curb
Our late great magnolia in its prime. ::sniffles, wipes away a tear:: When the petals fell, we’d have to shovel them off the driveway.
I honestly prefer it when it is just blooming than full flower
Award winning ones!
That particular one? Yes, they are planted as ornamentals. I had one in my yard but it died.
‘Magnolia’ is like Bay. There are a zillion kinds and everyone refers to them differently mostly depending on geographic location.
*As an undergrad I wrote a study on oaks. I looked at 1000 different oak trees and could not find a single pair of them that were identical. They were clearly all cross pollinations from reds, whites, blacks, pins, waters, etc.
I’ve noticed it’s nigh impossible to match color and grain buying oak (or pine for that matter) boards at the hardware store. I wonder if that’s why.
I would think you know what you’re doing if that sort of thing is important to you. Your choices are
a) go to a lumber yard that deals in higher-end lumber because they’ll be serious and have such lots even if you’re buying oak, or
b) just buy boards (cants?) that are big enough to be ripped into “booked” boards: nothing matches better than wood cut from one tree
FWIW, I saw pecky going for only $12 in Ponchatoula last week
I’ve noticed it’s nigh impossible to match color and grain buying oak (or pine for that matter) boards at the hardware store. I wonder if that’s why.
Commercial lumber categorizes all oak into two flavors, red and white, and there are so many species rolled up into those two categories, it’s not surprising you’re seeing a lot of variation in color and grain. And I’m assuming that you’re even being given a choice between red and white, if they are just selling “oak”, who the hell knows.
The problem is you are buying oak at a hardware store, were the average employee can barely make change.
You need to head to a mill, ask for 6/4 on four board feet finished. Then you will get real, matching wood.
he ain’t got no mill ’cause
he ain’t got no trees
funny this: every house in Amarillo has a chimney, but there ain’t a tree thicker than 8″ for 400 miles….what they burning?
I am not sure Pat. I was comparing leaf shapes with the oaks. Grain and color are highly dependent on specific environment. Water, light, soil etc makes a big difference. I live on a rocky hill and the soil on the hill and at the foot of the hill is very different so two trees of the same age and species look different. I also notice that the peppers I grow on the hill and below the hill taste very different and have wildly different hotness.
Tbh, I’m a bit of a woodworking neophyte, but enjoy it on the rare occasions when I actually put a project together. The type of stuff I’d do rarely requires perfection, it’s more just an OCD thing. I did overhear a guy at our local hardware store mention a much better mill about 40 miles from here, so I might have to check that out. I’ve been wanting to build a small memorial display for my mom’s cremains for the last couple years, and for something like that I’d want it done right.
Very nice! I can sympathize with the perpetual problem of late frosts wrecking the blossoms. Our own magnificent magnolia had one of its main trunks broken during a storm last year. Even worse, the tree guy who came to take care of it pointed out that pretty much all the older trunks were dead or dying. He cut it down to just the main stump and a little offshoot growing out of the base (affectionately known as “Baby Groot.”) We’re holding out hope that Baby Groot will bloom soon without threat of frost.
well hoping for the best.
My main worry are the apricot trees not the magnolia… but I shall see what happens.
Indeed! Good luck with the apricots! 🤞🍀
first bloom this year was march 10th. Last year it was February 25th. Two years ago March 5th.
So what is everyone drinking? Me and my mom a nice wine from my collection Catleya Epopee 2013. Very nice. Very very nice. Perfect time to drink it. After 8 years in my wine cooler it tells me my wine cooler works to preserve wine
https://photos.app.goo.gl/CmURvZMPeMD1ZChg8
Had a mediocre Riesling last night. Hoping to do better tonight with a Cabernet Franc.
I dunno man seems kinda cheap
Also for some stupid reason google deletet my maps timeline though i had it set to never delete. This is annoying
Talk about a glitch in the matrix. The data probably still exists, it’s just not being shown to you.
I simply cannot comprehend why people would voluntarily opt in for that…
well I often remember stuff like when I went to Munich in 2017 i went to this really nice wine bar, but have no idea which one. When I went in 2024 I looked in my timeline and found it.
“Science is telling us that we can do phenomenal things if we put our minds and our resources to it,” read the message from Fauci, who ended his five-decade career at the agency in December 2022.
Reality is no match for science.
“This is the kind of treatment that scientists get in totalitarian societies like Stalinist Russia if they don’t toe the political line of the leaders,” Raskin said.
Deplatforming and exiling people who don’t agree with the establishment consensus “science” ? Who would do such a thing?
Everything is getting more and more paywalled. Are people supposed to have 37 subscriptions?
Use archive.fo or similar to get around it.
Tbh, that’s probably how it should have been in the first place. If people had gotten used to paying for subscriptions on the internet the same as they did on dead trees we wouldn’t have the ad-driven panopticon we do presently.
While you could subscribe to treeware news, you could also go to the store and anonymously buy whatever different publications you wanted. There were ads, but no data-collecting panopticon involved.
Photo caption:
“Ohhh, tryin’ ta sneak up on me, are ya?”
R C, from above-
Sustainability can be assessed on a first order basis by asking if something is profitable, that is, whether it generates more value than it consumes.
That’s my take. From a fundamental cost benefit analysis, if the costs exceed the benefits, over time, whatever you’re doing is not “sustainable”.
AMTRAK, for one, begs to differ. Fifty + years of subsidizing railfans and people who don’t want to get groped by TSA.
If any network-y people are still on this thread: my aged Baystack switch had a little TIA last night. Power cycle brought it back to life, but I’m thinking maybe time to upgrade to something made in this decade. I’m looking at this Ubiquiti switch:
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/switching-standard/products/usw-24-poe
I need 24 ports, and I have plans that make POE a nice feature. I’m not keen on a “consumer” brand like D-Link, etc., on the possibly unfounded premise that consumer grade hardware is more likely to have dangerously buggy firmware. I’ve got an older Ubiquiti AP that I’m happy with.
Any thoughts, suggestions or counterarguments?
for seniors active in the heat, don’t let one of these go “diagnosed” as dehydration
It is true, the switch has not been getting much hydration.
As someone inactive in the heat, the cold and everything in between I can’t worry.
Today is the 4th anniversary of a life changing event, I should have sued the home owner but I know that guy too well.
The moral of the story: Do the best you can with what you have. It ain’t gonna get better.
Abuse of power
A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the National Park Service and five other federal agencies to immediately reinstate probationary employees who were fired en masse last month, ruling that the Office of Personnel Management had no legal authority to mandate their terminations.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in a scathing rebuke of the Donald Trump administration’s actions, declared the mass firings a violation of federal law and accused officials of using procedural loopholes to sidestep legal protections. In addition to 1,000 employees who were terminated from the park service, his order affects employees at the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury, who were abruptly dismissed in February.
“It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said from the bench. “That should not have been done in our country. It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.”
The judge made clear that while federal agencies can conduct layoffs, they must follow legally defined “reduction-in-force” procedures. He accused the Office of Personnel Management of orchestrating an unlawful workaround by directing departments to fire workers without due process.
You can’t fire those people without a good reason. “We don’t need, and cannot afford them” is not a good reason.
the Park Service. The correct approach is for a president whose party controls both houses to simply dispense with the entire DOI.
What an odd choice of name for a department that does not have the legal authority to… manage personnel.
Lunatic fringe zealots baying for blood
The liberal organizing group Indivisible said Saturday it was calling for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down from his leadership role, the latest fallout after he backed a GOP bill to keep the government open.
The group’s call is the latest sign of just how much Schumer’s decision to vote for a Republican bill Friday has angered a Democratic grassroots itching for a fight with President Donald Trump.
Many Democrats saw a potential government shutdown as one of the party’s sole points of leverage on the government funding bill as Trump and Elon Musk have moved to shutter programs and cancel spending previously allocated by Congress. But Schumer and a handful of Democrats aligned with him argued doing so would only give the pair more power, and that the consequences of a shutdown would be worse than the bill.
Let the Jacobins drag him off to the guillotine. I’m sure they can find a suitable replacement. I’ll be over here, with my bucket of popcorn.
Allowing your party to be held hostage by the type of retards who think moobs is too conservative is why you lost to Trump twice. I’ll collect that $500,000 consulting fee any time.
Looks like the D’s are letting Schumer be the target of anger right now, even though they stood to lose everything by shutting down the gov’t:
because we want a Mitch McConnell
You can have him.
My first thought too.
Alabama apparently has never wanted him back
Talk about a “give us Barabas” moment.
Another atrocity
The missing eaglet born to a popular Southern California eagle couple died in a recent winter storm, the nonprofit that owns and operates the eagles’ nest cameras said Saturday.
Jackie and Shadow’s missing eaglet “did not make it through the severe winter storm,” Jenny Voisard, media and website manager for Friends of Big Bear Valley, said in a statement.
More than 2 feet of snow fell in the area during the storm, Voisard said.
Trump gutted the weather service, and this is the result.
Mrs. Dean follows the feeds from that nest (and has for years). The third and last egg didn’t hatch until a week or more after the others; that’s probably the one that didn’t make it through the storm. I think this is the first successful hatch that pair has had in three years or more.
It is a really cool feed to follow. During and after the storm, the nest was completely covered in snow, with only the mother eagle’s head sticking up above it.
Jackie and Shadow continued to feed their young on Saturday, Voisard said.
“Days like these test us as humans because we fear uncertainty and the unknown,” Voisard said. “Our hope is that seeing Jackie and Shadow persevere and work to move forward, brings some comfort and peace. We are reminded again that nature is wild and unscripted.”
*dabs tear*