Linky Friday: I Fought The Lawd
Law:
Image by briansuda 
[L1] To be guilty of fraud, do you have to actually have defrauded someone?
[L2] I think we want to be pretty careful before we start making exceptions to this.
[L3] Zillow picked on a young blogger previously linkied here, but the blog won.
[L4] Comcast allegedly misunderstood what “cutting the cord” means.
[L5] A Canadian court wants to compel Google to delist websites with certain illegal content (in this case, bootleg and unauthorized songs and movies).
[L6] Judicial activism I can get behind.
War:
Image by libertygrace0
[W1] A Canadian sniper just got a record-breaking killshot.
[W2] We metaphorically sank the battleship.
[W3] The personal archives of Daesh fighters introduce us to their dark and dramatic private worlds.
[W4] Matt Hipple argues that any space corps belongs with the Navy.
[W5] The dark history of the engineering of the VX Nerve Agent.
[W6] Seems like Los Alamos needs to shape up.
Religion:
[R1] The New York Times looks at the partisanship of pastors.
[R2] Is Muslim theocracy a product of the failures of western secularism?
[R3] With the Ark Encounter theme park having gone bust, Ken Ham blames atheists and fake news.
[R4] The Smithsonian is finding God! Well, not quite, but I suspect you know what I mean.
[R5] “[A]mnesty for assault victims.”
[R6] Church, but for the secular.
Media:
Image by Nickogibson
[M1] Adam Gurri argues that actually hot take culture is good.
[M2] Lee Smith argues that Facebook is destroying the media. Sure seems like something always is.
[M3] The media lost interest in the Steve Scalise shooting a lot more quickly than it did the Gabby Giffords one. One the one hand, we didn’t have a president that was as good at drawing media attention as the current one is. On the other, I’m not sure that’s why.
[M4] Jonathan Kay, Damon Linker, and Bret Stephens (listed in descending order of worthiness) all take aim at Twitter. Kevin Drum for the defense.
[M5] China is putting up a ban on livestreaming, because it’s too hard to censor.
[M6] It’s definitely to CNN’s credit they took decisive action, but given the givens they need to take extra care to be careful from the outset. Also, Vice?
Politics:
Image by Loimere
[Po1] As go the suburbs, so goes the state.
[Po2] Seems like maybe there was more policy could do about illegal immigration than the last couple presidents let on.
[Po3] Karl Smith suggests that libertarians exist.
[Po4] Stephen Daisley laments how Labour went to the left until it ended up on the right. Trump’s name doesn’t come up, but if you’re not inclined not to see some parallels, you just might…
[Po5] Also: How the British left went mad for Bolshevism and ignored the purges.
[Po6] And lastly, how Labour was saved by George Osborne and Ed Miliband.
Feature Image by Waiting For The Word
L6 [state courts striking down protectionist alcohol regulations]:
The argument presented here, while reasonable in some ways, may have the unintended effect of weakening the possibility of decriminalizing pot.
Sometimes politics really is the art of the possible. Many state and local liquor laws are usually foolish, and especially foolish when they are protectionist or confer certain monopoly-style privileges. However….that was part of the trade off of overturning Prohibition. It was the gesture to federalism and subsidiarity that allowed the end of a bad policy. And for the record, while “IANAL, and the courts appear to be deciding differently, etc.,” I read the 21st amendment as permitting state-level protectionism.
I suspect that if the movement to legalize pot ever gets any traction at the federal, it would involve (along with re-scheduling the drug) the feds permitting states to impose their own regulations, and that might create just as many incentives for state-level protectionism as the 21st amendment. (I don’t imagine that such a change, if at all forthcoming, will be in the form of a constitutional amendment. But it could probably happen by federal statute.)
My main point is, challenging this compromise when it comes to alcohol could inadvertently make federal pot-decriminalization less likely. None of that, however, changes my view that a good number of local-level liquor laws are silly.Report
It was only a few years back that Colorado finally allowed liquor stores to be open on Sunday.
We still can’t buy more than 3.2 beer at the grocery store (so no wine or “real” beer).
There was recently a “compromise” bill that was passed allowing *SOME* grocery stores to sell wine or spirits, but the whole “let’s do it the way they do it in 46 other states” attitude won’t kick in fully until 2037.
I have no idea how much these laws contributed to the attitudes that it’d be okay to legalize marijuana. I’ve never thought about it before.Report
NJ doesn’t bar it at grocery stores but it does limit person and corps to two retail distributor licenses, so that pretty much eliminates it from any chain. There was a convenience store a town over growing up that sold beer and later than when most liquor stores closed down, but it wasn’t part of any chain.
The town I just moved to does have what appears to be an affiliated beer and wine store above the Stop & Shop. Not sure exactly how that works. Maybe they are one of S&S’s two licenses?
So it isn’t illegal to sell it at these stores in NJ… it’s just practically illegal.Report
I’m not talking about so much how those laws affected legalization at the state level so much as I”m speculating that in order to sell it as a federal policy, states would have to be allowed to enact those types of laws. Maybe that’s a messy distinction, but there it is.
I remember when I moved to Big City. I was surprised that regular supermarkets sold hard liquor. I, too, was used to them selling only beer, although I didn’t realize it was limited to 3.2 beer.Report
I always have a moment of discombobulation when I am first visiting my parents’ state after a while and am reminded that the Walgreens can sell any kind of liquor they want.
Here, we have beer (cold beer can only be 3.2 beer) and that Boone’s Farm stuff in some groceries; real wine and spirits you have to go to a liquor store for. I am sure the intent was partly paternalistic – it is kind of a deterrent for me to want to walk into a liquor store and I’m much more prone to go “Meh, I’ll experiment with broth and vinegar” when I have a recipe calling for wine.
I also suspect our somewhat archaic liquor laws are partly why we don’t really have any good supermarkets. (We didn’t really have much choice of restaurants in town before a liquor-by-the-drink ordinance got passed – before it, places could sell low-point beer and that was it, I think)Report
I do know that having grown up in Cibolia, I was reluctant to walk into liquor stores after turning 21 because doing so had a tinge of immorality for me. While that “tinge” is probably mostly a result of whatever values I acquired during my upbringing,* it might have had something to do with the laws that restricted most alcohol to such stores.
*Strangely so, however. My parents and most of my siblings drank, although they certainly weren’t heavy, or even “moderate,” drinkers. My father would buy a 12-pack of beer for Thanksgiving, and there’d still be some cans left over in January. He’d also buy a bottle of Wild Turkey that would last at least several years.Report
L1: Attempting to do something illegal is generally not allowed even if you get stopped before any victim exists.
L2: I am not entirely sure why the Courts decided to depart from the traditional procedure in this case besides some sympathy for the wife for an unexplained reason.
L5: This going to make it harder for Americans like me to keep up with the Murdoch Mysteries.
L6: Besides the very good points that Gabriel Conroy brings up, liberals generally don’t like it when courts strike down economic regulations based by the legislature because we see it as imposed economic conservatism.
R2: The problem that I have with these defenses of Muslim theocracy is that they ignore the non-Muslim minorities in many Muslim states. The non-Muslims in Egypt, Indonesia, Syria, Pakistan, Malaysia and other Muslim countries do not find the prospect of living in a Muslim theocracy attractive. I also imagine that there is a decent minority of Muslims that find Muslim theocracy an unattractive prospect. Its really easy to find complaints about how say Israel’s Jewish identity or India’s Hindu or Thailand or Burma’s Buddhist identity alienates the Muslim minority in those countries but the people who make these complaints are usually willing to allow Muslims their theocracy despite the alienation of non-Muslim minorities. You can’t have it both ways. Muslim majority countries should be no more immune to the prerogatives of pluralism and secularism than non-Muslim majority countries.
R4: It turns out that a Curator achieved God in the wrong museum.
R6: This seems to be a hot topic in the atheist community. Many atheists like these secular churches because it allows them to have the parts of going to church that they miss but others, mainly of the hard atheist variety, seem to think that these people are doing atheism wrong.
M1: I’m tired of hot take culture. I want hot cake culture.
Po1: This gets it right. Yes, the Republicans won all the special elections but they were in very Republican districts and their lead decreased dramatically. If every Republican held district suffered the same point decrease that GA-6 did than it would be a giant Democratic wave election.
Po2: Asylum seekers from Central America and other countries are not illegal immigrants. The way that the asylum system in the United States work is that an alien needs to come to the United States first before asking for asylum. This means that some method of questionable travel is often needed. An alien can not go to the United States consulate nearest them and say they need asylum because the Consulate has no authority to grant asylum or even issue a visa for would be asylum seekers, unless the Consulate official is willing to engage in some unlawful violations of their job as well.
Po3: Chait has the right of this arguments. Libertarians exist but not at electorally significant levels. The ones that do exist seem unwilling to really try to convince non-libertarians on how libertarianism will make their life better. They mainly talk among themselves, although every political group is guilty of this, and use revolutionary vanguard tactics to impose libertarianism rather than trying to gain political office by election.
Po4: I lament that Corbyn’s checkered history wasn’t given much weight either but I fail to see how the Labour Party is on the Right now. They advocated a very leftist policy package in the last election. Brexit isn’t really right wing or left wing. When the United Kingdom entered the EEC under Heath, both parties were very divided about it and they remained divided about it ever since.
Po5: Many people who should have known better ignored the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. However, a lot of people on the Right admired the Fascists during the 1920s and 1930s and ignored their atrocities.Report
You can’t have it both ways.
Says?Report
BobReport
I’ve long suspected Bob is why we can’t have nice things.Report
What defense of Islamic theocracy? R2 did nothing of the sort.Report
I’d like to see more libertarians doing this, and likewise, I’d like to see the Libertarian Party making more effort to take local and state elections. Too much focus on the big seats.Report
Much of America, especially the left, was enthralled by Mussolini in the 20’s and 30’s.
Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, published in 1972.
“I don’t mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman.” — FDR on Mussolini.
Then in June 1940 FDR condemned Mussolini’s “stab in the back.” Betrayal hurts.
““The Corporate State is to Mussolini what the New Deal is to Roosevelt.” — Fortune magazine.
“Mussolini’s conception of power and authority has many points in common with that of the men who inspired our own constitution – John Adams, Hamilton and Washington.” — New York Times, 1923
Mussolini was fairly popular abroad, especially in intellectual circles, until his 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. He was especially popular with progressives who, in the aftermath of the Great War, were having some doubts about the inherent wisdom of democracies. The far left (Communists) stayed almost silent on Mussolini throughout the 20’s and only tepidly criticized him in the 30’s. The New Republic was on board, but The Nation was more skeptical.Report
Did you read the article? That’s not the issue in dispute. The claim is that a particular business model is inherently fraudulent, even if there’s no misrepresentation.Report
Po2: Asylum seekers from Central America and other countries are not illegal immigrants. The way that the asylum system in the United States work is that an alien needs to come to the United States first before asking for asylum. This means that some method of questionable travel is often needed. An alien can not go to the United States consulate nearest them and say they need asylum because the Consulate has no authority to grant asylum or even issue a visa for would be asylum seekers, unless the Consulate official is willing to engage in some unlawful violations of their job as well.
Or, to put it another way, the exact technical difference is that refugee seekers are getting authorization before they come here, whereas asylum seekers are already here.
That doesn’t mean they are breaking the law, though. They could just walk up to the border and ask for asylum. Which is what these children are doing, so, yes, they are not here illegally in any sense.
But even if they do enter illegally…the US has signed the 1951 Convention and Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, and that says in Article 31:
‘The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their
illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory
where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article 1, enter or
are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present
themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their
illegal entry or presence.’
I.e, if someone comes here directly from a nation where they were in danger, with forged paperwork, (Like they escape Iran on a forged passport.) the US government is required to ignore that illegality…assuming they turn themselves in ‘without delay’.
Apparently, US law currently defines ‘without delay’ as 15 days, although I’m a bit startled we allow them to leave the airport without telling us. Surely the proper thing would be to tell ICE there.
This only applies if they escape directly here. They can’t, like, escape to another country and then come here illegally. Well, they can..they just don’t get any exception to any breakage of the law they might have done getting here.Report
Justice Department gives up Washington Redskins name fight
http://pro32.ap.org/article/justice-department-gives-washington-redskins-name-fightReport
HTTR!Report
I grew up with the Redskins and am happy to see this.Report
I remain a devotee despite Dan Snyder’s best efforts. Watching them completely shit the bed on the Kirk Cousins situation has been brutal through.Report
Wow, Jeff Session’s DOJ has no problem with racial slurs?Report
Wow, law enforcement follows the Constitution as clarified by the Supreme Court.Report
Yeah, the situations are exactly the same.Report
Plural situation”s”? I don’t follow.Report
Neither does the Supreme Court. It’s really shocking.Report
A racial slur kinda requires that a significant percentage of the race in question find it offensive (i.e. not woke white people).Report
I find it extremely surprising that many Native Americans don’t’ find Redskin to at least be a slur. I can’t imagine any of the many Alaska Native/Native American’s i’ve known to feel that way. But it could also be different in other parts of the country.Report
Most of the gay people I’ve known hated words like “queer” and “faggot”. But a certain percentage of the population has tried to reclaim the words.Report
Yeah. But i’ve never heard Native Americans trying to reclaim Redskin or other epithets. Maybe it’s happening, but i haven’t seen it.Report
Might depend on current usage. Are Native Americans encountering ‘redskin’ directed against them as a slur very much? Could be there are other, more salient slurs they encounter, and redskin has kinda faded.
Also, it’s a WaPo poll, so I don’t know how scientific it is, but it was the first to pop on the Googles. Perhaps there is a better poll that shows something different.Report
I don’t know how commonly used “redskin” is now. It seems like an old fashioned term to me. I can’t think of any Alaska Native/Native American’s i know that aren’t at least somewhat sensitive to slurs and how their history is presented.Report
Seems almost exclusively used for mascots. Whenever the subject comes up, though, somebody goes to some highly populated Amerindian school that has that mascot and hasn’t changed it. (Can’t remember the specific school or where it is.)
There is some polling on each side of the issue, which indicates some ambiguity surrounding the issue. Perhaps pertaining to who we believe has a voice in this discussion (Those that live on reservations? Those that belong to specific groups? Those that show up to protests?) and what weight should be given to it.Report
U of North Dakota change from the Fighting Sioux to something else i believe after the tribe asked. There was some school, a MAC one think, that was the Chippewa’s i think. It does depend a lot on the locality and whether there is a specific tribal group asking for a change.Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_TreeReport
I respect how the Ent’s feel about this kind of thing.Report
It’s not easy to get them riled up, but once they are, look out.Report
The North Dakota case was complicated by the fact that one Sioux Tribe wanted it gone, and another Sioux Tribe actually went to court to prevent it from being changed. My main complaint at this point is that they went with “Hawks” (yawn) instead of “Sundogs” (cooool!) to replace Fighting Sioux.
This was such a great opportunity for some schools to stake out new and original mascots to replace tired ones like “Indians.” Unfortunately, most of them went with some really unoriginal ones like Hawks, Warhawks, RedHawks, and Red Wolves. Very frustrating.Report
I’ve always had a fondness for the Banana Slug mascot, Sammy, of UC Santa Cruz.Report
I’ve never understood the idea of a mascot, really. But they’re typically fierce things, and that’s a fairly small list.
ETA: Just for kicks, I googled “dangerous animals”, and here’s what came up at the top:
Cape Buffalo
Cone Snail
Golden Poison Dart Frog
Box Jellyfish
Puffer Fish
Black Mamba
Saltwater Crocodiles
Tsetse Fly
Not a lot of potential team names there, and at least two racial slurs.Report
Doesn’t have to be scary things. Needs to have something admirable or interesting or unique about it. I think somebody should have gone with Water Bears, because they’re indestructable. Rhinos look fierce, which ought to be good enough. There are also lots of kinds of birds out there *other* than hawks (and eagles), but they always seem to go back to hawks and eagles. Very frustrating.
It’s unfortunate more dinosaurs weren’t named with mascot potential in mind.Report
When I was attending the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, I always thought that they should have stayed with “Bugeaters.”Report
When I was last in Omaha (about 15 years ago), they were selling the Bugeater shirts in stores by the river. Might be an Omaha thing though.Report
The UNL Athletic Department* sells Bugeater shirts and memorabilia on their web site. The 1892 Bugeaters football team is noted for a forfeit win over the University of Missouri. Missouri players refused to take the field because the Bugeaters had a black player (George Flippin, a student at the medical school).
* The Athletic Department is a separate legal entity in order to make it easier to ensure state statutes forbidding the use of University funds for athletics are followed.Report
I recently watched an indoor football game on TV with a team that called itself the Omaha Beef.Report
this amuses my inner 12 year old because “beef,” in some circles, is a euphemism for flatus.Report
Why don’t teams mine the mythological? Who doesn’t want to have the stadium announcer call out “Release the San Diego Krakens!”Report
The Los Angeles Fast Zombies like in 28 Days LaterReport
Dragons has been used, but probably isn’t used enough. Titans is used, of course. Chupacabras is asking to be used by some southwestern team.Report
I’m surprised “The Dragons” isn’t more common. Maybe because it’s been slang for heroin.Report
Now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way, all we need do is use the Racial Slur Database
The Calispell Caspers
The Detroit Drybacks – an obvious hockey team.
The Anchorage Harpoon Chuckers.
The Boston Bog Trotters.
The Cincinnati Huns.
The Miami RaftersReport
Allentown Allosaurus
Tri-Cities Triceratops
Bremerton Brontosaurus ( Diplodocus doesn’t work here)Report
ETA: Just for kicks, I googled “dangerous animals”, and here’s what came up at the top:
Yeah, but a lot of those animals kill people by poisoning, which is generally seen as a sort of underhanded tactic for a human and not something that football teams would want to be associated with.
The only two that don’t are crocodiles, which are, indeed, used as a team name where crocodiles are, and buffalo, which also are.Report
There is some irony there. I think one of the most frequent mascot complaints made by actual Native Americans is that the school or city uses a depiction of a Sioux Indian, when the tribe isn’t Sioux.Report
It does sound like a slur a great-grandparent would use. “Oh, he’s one of those oat-eaters.” “Gramps, don’t say things like that!” That’s why I could imagine that Indians might try to take it back – because it isn’t exactly causing fresh wounds.Report
It might not be a slur in much current use – but if a non-aboriginal person addressed an aboriginal person as a “redskin”, it would be pretty clear what the intent was.Report
I’ve never thought of Alaska natives as redskins. They’re kind of blue. Brrrr….Report
@oscar-gordon
FWIW, that survey relied on self-reporting of enrollment with a tribe, which means it risks including folks who claim their grandma was 1/16th Cherokee and Elizabeth Warren.Report
Sounds like a topic that could use some rigor.Report
It’s a situation where no one’s sure if an antiquated slur is giving anyone offense as a team name. Why does it call for rigor? Why can’t we just note that people sure are different, and go back to what we were doing?Report
Rigor if you really want to know if it’s a problem for a significant population. AFAIK the only people who have a problem are a few vocal Native Americans and a whole lot of white people with too much free time.Report
How Illinois became America’s most messed-up state
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/investing/illinois-budget-crisis-downgrade/index.html
Illinois is on the verge of becoming America’s first state with a junk credit rating.Report
The big news today is the Illinois Republican Senate leader announces she’s retiring from the legislator on Saturday. The ship is being abandoned to drift on the winds of God’s eternal mercy. There is none to be had from the political class fighting for control of this burning hull.Report
It makes me wonder what’s going to happen both in Illinois and Puerto Rico.Report
Well, one idea…Report
If they time it right, and Puerto Rico became a state at the same time, there would be no flag alteration required.Report
Or DC!
Of course, DC should be retroceded to Maryland, which has about as much chance as happening as divvying up Illinois.Report
Which of those state legislatures is going to take Chicago and almost certainly turn Democratic?Report
They could be reduced to territorial status for 20 years, or until they demonstrate that they’ve re-earned the vote.Report
Show me where the Constitution gives Congress the authority to reduce a state’s status, even by request. If there were any theory along those lines, surely some conservative think tank would be talking up “let’s make California a territory.” :^)Report
Well, we sort of have nebulous precedent if you declare open revolt…Report
The Constitution is a living document. The Framers never envisioned things like the Illinois voter.Report
The scenario is emerging. Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Illinois to pay its $2 billion backlog of Medicaid bills. Illinois does not have a budget and cannot legally comply. Are the feds prepared to send in the army to enforce the Supremacy Clause? Does Illinois not have the right to defend itself and its peculiar institution?Report
I’m always interested in the different priorities that states have in law or their constitutions. Here in Colorado, Medicaid is permanently appropriated and is one of the few things that would get paid if the legislature failed to pass a budget. Salaries and benefits for employees wouldn’t get paid at all.Report
Or Florida Man.Report
America was founded from states with junk credit ratings.Report
Where is this generation’s Alexander Hamilton? Please don’t tell me he starring on Broadway.Report
L4: I suspect that Comcast, or at least the contractor, will be absolved. In Texas, for an underground facility to be protected, it has to be registered with the appropriate agency. If a knowledgeable contractor — and in my experience, Comcast is careful about who it hires — says it believes that it was encountering abandoned facilities, it’s almost certainly because they checked with the agency and were told there were no registered active facilities in the corridor. Supporting evidence for my speculation is that the recording and notification agency is not mentioned once. One phone call of the “Comcast is digging up our registered facilities” flavor would be enough to get the excavation permits pulled.Report
The complaint alleges the cable lines were marked: “The foreman freshly marked, in fact but the crew had inexplicably ignored the markings, purportedly because they assumed that the fresh orange paint marked an ‘abandoned’ cable plant.”
But OTOH, it sounds like the small cable company marked the lines themselves when they heard Comcast would be digging in the area. That doesn’t sound like normal procedure where I live. There is a central phone registry one should call, they contact the utilities registered in the area, and you are entitled to a statutory defense from damaging a utility that wasn’t marked.Report
Texas statute is pretty clear about what the sequence of events is: excavator calls the registration/notification agency saying where they’ll be digging, agency notifies operators of properly registered underground facilities, operators go mark their lines. Operators so notified are also allowed to have inspectors present during excavation, and the excavator has to make reasonable accommodations for observation.
There are lots of possibilities for what happened. For me, by far the most likely is that the tiny cable operator had not taken the steps to be a “class A operator” and gain legal protection for their facilities.Report
BTW/ The main reason I looked at the complaint was I was curious about the damage theory. A small new company is going to have a hard time proving lost profits that are not going to be seen as speculative. This is what the Complaint argues:
“The telecommunications industry commonly values subscribers on a per-subscriber basis, and as Comcast is well aware, there is an established market for cable customers. For example, in 2014, Comcast agreed to sell a large group of customers for slightly over $5,214 per customer. At the time of its destruction, Telecom had 229 satisfied customers. Measured at a value of $5,214 per customer,Telecom’s customer base was an asset worth just over $1,194.000.00. However, Plaintiffs note that a higher pre-customer value thus a higher total value of the customer base — may be appropriate.”
There are some other claims, but this is the largest, and I would love to know where Comcast paid that much per customer.Report
Under some conditions, $5K per subscriber might not be an unreasonable price. Depends on lots of things — quality of the built-out plant, potential for growth, what sort of goodies the local franchising authority will demand to approve the acquisition, existing debt per subscriber, side deals, etc. If everything breaks the right way, $5K per sub is reasonable.
Speculation, but this does not look like a high-value operation. Weston Lakes is an exurb with a pretty clear intent to maintain quite low household density, so high costs per sub. Small cable companies (229 total subscribers!) usually cut every possible corner on plant — minimal fiber, cheap or even no innerduct, low-quality gear everywhere. Most probably, Comcast offered them something like $1K per subscriber, since it was going to be a total rebuild with limited revenue opportunities. That the local franchising authority let Comcast do an overbuild also suggests the existing service was crap, with little chance the small operator could afford to upgrade.Report
I don’t doubt that Comcast did a deal that was worth $5k per subscriber; I’m mostly amused that I think that paragraph is structured to imply that this is a common value. I would think the most important thing is whether the market is essentially a monopoly.
What might give Comcast problems is that at some point the supervisor was allegedly informed about the small operator’s lines and combined with the breakdown in previous sales negotiations, the lawsuit may track on a separate path than conventional negligent digging. All that together, the amount of damages appear difficult. Its easier for an established business like McDonalds to point to five years of profit and loss statements and give a very credible estimate of how much profits it lost when I rammed my hummer through the drive through and the business was closed for three days. A cable company with 229 subscribers? Are they very price sensitive and therefore prone to cut the cord? How many years does the average subscriber stay with the company? Do they have other income streams per subscriber than the subscription fee?Report
I’m just making a prediction. If/when it comes to trial, it will turn out that the mom-and-pop cable outfit provided much worse service for the buck than Comcast provides; that the franchising authority knew that and gave Comcast the go-ahead; that Comcast’s contractors were scrupulously within the letter of the law on notifications and timing of same; and that the mom-and-pop’s outside plant will be shown to be so fragile that the damage done was as little as could realistically be expected.
State statutes, franchising authorities, and economies of scale are all stacked against the tiny mom-and-pop operator. When one of the big guys’ fiber footprint expands to where it reaches the mom-and-pop, everyone but the mom-and-pop wants them to take the $1K per sub offer and walk away. I won’t say that the big guys are vindictive — but I’d be willing to make a small wager that the mom-and-pop will lose money on the court case after legal expenses.Report
CNN did the right thing but just like NYT and the Post they’ve hopelessly tarnished themselves with this big fat Russian nothing burger. Just like the NYT correction it shows that MSM journalists will still, even after 2003, hysterically quote any person wandering around Langley or Fort Meade without the least bit of skepticism or due diligence. Its really unfortunate because we need a functioning press and I’m not sure the traditional outlets are up to the task.Report
W2: We keep having this discussion because battleships are so darned sexy! But no one suggests building new ones, and there are good reasons for that. They can’t do anything that can’t be done more cheaply by something else. This has been true since, oh, let’s say late 1941. It made sense to go ahead and use the ones we had, but there is a reason they didn’t start building any new ones after that. In the 1980s there was a quasi-plausible argument to be made that updating the ones we still had kicking around made economic sense, but even then it was questionable. I remember from the time that another argument was that having them would help Naval recruitment and retention, the idea being that sailors would line up for the chance to serve on a ship that was that darned sexy. Even if this made sense in the 1980s, that time is long past. Let the museums keep them. We have newer and better ways to pound the crap out of people we want to pound the crap out of.Report
Perhaps after DARPA/NRC has their rail gun ready for duty, we could build a new class of battleship around that weapon system, but resurrecting the old giants? No way.Report
R6: We were hearing a lot about this a few years ago. I figured at the time it was the flavor of the week. It is not clear to me how much this is a trend and how much a niche. My guess is that latter. In any case, my reaction is haven’t these people ever heard of the Unitarians? Church without all that religion stuff has been around for a long time.Report
yeah, but the Unitarians aren’t cool and new.Report
M3: The “on the one hand” is on point. The thing about the corporate media is that it has a short attention span and is easily distracted by shiny objects. This tendency is non-partisan, but any particular manifestation can give the appearance of partisanship. If the linked article were serious, and not merely a repetition of the “liberal media” talking point, it would look at what else was going on at the time.Report
Federalist gonna Federalist, but my view is that the media prefers stories that fit into existing or preferred narratives, which the Gifford story initially did. This can cut in either direction, but does not do so symmetrically.Report
You mean like a sympathetic victim? Maybe a minority, females or LGBT?Report
A bullet in the head is always going to be more newsworthy than a bullet in the hip.Report
Unless it’s a Kardashian. Then the hip wound would generate all the coverage.Report
Media observation: one of my buds has construction going on right outside of where they work. They told me that they overheard a construction guy complaining about Trump tweeting. “I didn’t vote for him so he’d tweet like an idiot” is a paraphrase.
Perhaps a politics observation as well.Report
Was the construction worker Michael Brendan Dougherty?
Trump should get off his phone and start lying to my face. All our faces.Report
I’m told that it’s all part of his persuasive genius, so I’m sure it will be fine.Report
“I didn’t vote for him so he’d tweet like an idiot”
No one could have predicted he’d tweet like an idiot.Report
No one had to predict anything, he was already tweeting like an idiot before the election. The prediction was that he would stop.Report
No, the prediction was he would lose, though I suppose Mika and Joe had expectations about their friend they vouched for.Report
As for R2: it is too soon to tell. The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that Islam is going through its own Reformation, but the entrenched powers have enough money to export their Martin Luthers to other parts of the world.
When the article says: “Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they”, I am reminded that the Protestant Reformation was a very important precursor to rational “Enlightenment” and it was bloody as hell with a thousand priests in a thousand parishes all saying “Sola Scriptura” before coming out with their own personal take on the text.
There are too many parallels for me to dismiss the “history repeating” narrative.Report
I think it is soon enough to tell. If Islam were, in any particular way, exempt from ways liquid modernity erodes the various religions then it would have spread like wildfire in the modern states where it was introduced. It hasn’t- just does the same thing the rest do- sputters and loses ground as the generations crawl along.
Frankly the only reason I see that Islam gets all the press as being somehow modernity resistant is merely that the Islam dominated countries and regions are so ass-over-teakettle dysfunctional that there’s no modernity to challenge it. That’s changing gradually too of course.Report
The problem is that Islam provides all the answers and discourages asking questions. Sometimes Muslims do ask questions, and whereas that used to be almost unheard of, kids texting each other is making it much more common.
But questioning Islam very often leads to rejecting Islam, so there are a whole lot of Muslim atheists out there. If they can get out of the closet, they’ll make great citizens.Report
Sorry, I think your ex-Evangelical antenna are mis-calibrated on this one. I think Hamid is teasing out something real here. Reformation->Enlightenment->Secularism isn’t a necessary path. In fact, Secularism exerts a force all its own that changes the paths down which Islam might go.Report
Right, even if all religions are crazy, they are not crazy in the same way. The most radical elements of the Protestant Reformation believed in re-baptizing adults in imitation of Christ. They were slaughtered and pushed to the outskirts of civil society where they quietly awaited the return of Jesus to a hopelessly irredeemable world. The most radical elements of Islam today want to imitate the holy conqueror.Report
Heh, true even if they are not crazy; maybe even more true if the Secularists are the crazy ones.Report
Well, as I said, it’s too soon to tell.
Eventually there will be friction between the claims of the metaphysical abilities of Allah to influence the merely physical and the things that actually happen.
As time goes on, this will result in more and more refined exploration of the will of Allah and emphasis on the lack of understanding of people.
And Allah will get more and more subtle.Report
Horizon Air needs to cancel hundreds of flights in their core (and only) business because of an airline pilot shortage but fails to do anything that would make it more attractive to be a pilot:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/06/30/horizon_air_is_canceling_hundreds_of_flights_because_of_the_pilot_shortage.html
Report
People do not like working for peanuts. Highly trained people who invested a lot of time and money in learning the necessary skills especially don’t like working for peanuts.Report
Not a well-written article. First it says there is a pilot shortage but then argues that there isn’t without answering demonstrating it either way.
Are there enough people trained to do the job? If there are and they’re not doing the job because they are being paid more to do something else then there is no shortage. If not, there is a shortage because any employee they pick off or hold on to is a problem for other airlines and the main question is whose fault the shortage is (the airline’s, the consumer’s, the economy’s, a guild’s, or the government’s)Report
Agreed, the author alleges that the problem is pay, but offers no evidence that Horizon is skimping in that department, and instead points to a general claim that regionals pay crap (maybe Horizon does, but Horizon is it’s own branded line and the worst offenders of crap pilot pay tend to be the non-name lines that do contract flight for the bigger names).
Probably, the problem is finding enough pilots that are rated on the turboprop. A lot of regionals are deploying turboprops for short haul flights because they are a much lower (operating) cost option compared to a turbofan.Report
[L5] Was about the sale of products made with stolen trade secrets, not the listing of copyright violating websites. The RIAA started a publicity campaign about it to make people believe that it applied to copyright violating music websites but that is deeply misleading. The opperative law in Canada for claims internet based copyright violations is and remains “notice and notice.” Don’t trust anything the RIAA says about the law, they habitually skirt the fringes between being misleading and being outright dishonest.Report
W1:
That basically is not shooting anymore, beyond 1500 yards it’s more like small arms artillery. I figure these shooters must be carrying around an assortment of canted scope mounts.
Spin drift is probably over 20 feet.
The article mentions curvature of the earth. There really isn’t much of a problem with the curvature of the earth at that distance and if your target is within your line of sight that kind of solves itself. I think they meant the movement of the earth as in the coriolis effect.
Optics must be insane, even with the best, the target is going to look like a speck of sand.
It would make it more plausible if they were using the new guided 50.Report
W4 – YES! Seriously, the Air Force has neither the infrastructure, nor the training, nor the logistics experience (from crewing and supplies to the knowledge of how to spec out a ship that can spend years on a voyage) to be the predominate space agency.
And that is before we even talk about how terribly dysfunctional the USAF is culturally.Report
And it would make sense to have the space navy, because they would be the natural transport for the space marines.Report
Well, no point in calling them Marines if they are in space, except for historical reasons.Report
Well, you wouldn’t call them “space soldiers” because that’s just lame. And the historical reasons are important.Report
We could just keep MARINES for the acronym value:
My
Ass
Rides
In
Navy
Equipment &
ShipsReport
Heh. Uncle Sam’s Mistreated Cosmonauts works.
Space squids?Report
Sailor still works, kinda. Spacer just sounds stupid. Crewman is boring.
Space squids is just begging for some tentacle porn.Report
Red shirt.Report
If we are extrapolating from our current set up to the future then the Marines will absolutely make sure their are space marines. They’ll probably find a way to call their landing craft Space Amtrac’s. Heck there will be a space air force and space army. Also a space coast guard that somehow still won’t have enough ice breakers.Report
To revise an old joke: The first space marine will turn to the second space marine and say, “Things sure were different in the old (space marine) corps.Report
The space air force with just be The Aerospace Force, and their domain will end when they run out of atmo for aerodynamic lift.
Coast Guard will be Orbital Patrol, and they’ll be known as The Junk Patrol (as opposed to the current moniker of Puddle Patrol), since they will probably spend a lot of time de-orbiting crap out of orbits and navigation lanes. Or maybe the De-Orbit Patrol.Report
Someone in the Pentagon is already planing for Joint Base Moon so the army and air force have their toes in space. And yes they will resent having to have the space navy deliver all their gear.Report
Are they planning for the strip clubs, bars, high interest loan centers, and car dealerships just outside the Joint Base Moon?Report
Ooooh, low gravity strip joint !Report
The banana show will never be the same!Report