TSN Open Mic for the week of 4/17/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to Ten Second News.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these on the Sidebar every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
“In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, set to be broadcast on Monday and Tuesday night, Musk made the startling claims noting how he was shocked to learn that the government had full access to private communications on the platform.”
Shocked?! Really?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11980025/Elon-Musk-claims-Government-access-private-Twitter-DMs.htmlReport
The Dominion-Fox trial has been put off for a day because of settlement talks:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-delays-start-trial-dominion-lawsuit-against-fox-news-2023-04-17/
It would be irresponsible not to speculate on where the parties are. It’s unlikely that this came up suddenly and can realistically be put together from scratch in a day. Either talks have been ongoing for some time and the parties, probably Fox, made a big recent move or somebody, probably Fox, is panicking.Report
The Analysis on NPR this morning was that Fox is likely to loose on the merits, but Dominion might not be able to prove damages as significant as they allege. I THINK this means Fox is blinking . . . .Report
Without being able to look under the hood it is impossible to know but much more often than not the economics of litigation weigh in favor of settlement. Even if you think you could net more by taking something to verdict, through appeals, etc. there is still a massive premium to be paid in time and inconvenience.Report
Recent reports put the damages at $1.6B… which is probably difficult to sustain on ~$40M annual revenue.
“In their Dunn & Bradstreet filings, Dominion claimed annual sales of $36.5 million with contracts in 22 states and 600 local jurisdictions. ”
“The company is seeking $1.6bn in damages: it claims it sustained $921m in damage to its overall value as a business, in addition to $88m in lost profits. It is also seeking $600m in lost future profits, along with an unspecified amount of punitive damages to be determined by a jury”
Typically valuations are done on 3-5 yrs revenue/profit. $1.6B PLUS unspecified punitive damages probably wouldn’t survive the second phase even if they win.
My hunch? Fox sees an 8-figure settlement while dominion is holding firm at 9-figures and Fox is probably thinking low-9 and additional terms (no/crafted admission of guilt plus NDA) is better than guilty verdict and wild-card. Don’t think anyone believes there’s a 10-figure payout in the mix.
I’m seeing a lot of folks holding Dominion’s $$ hostage to getting Fox to grovel (with dreams of bankruptcy). While I think that’s fantasy land, I’m guessing in addition to the 9-figures, there’s some heavy wordsmithing going on regarding the acknowledgement and apology and NDA that would follow a settlment.Report
Smart litigants understand that civil litigation like this is just another part of business. While stranger things have happened I think it is unlikely that Dominion is going to carry water for its various *ahem* well wishers for free or in ways that don’t make business sense for Dominion. All to say there is good reason to think your take is in the ballpark of whats going on.Report
Typically valuations are done on 3-5 yrs revenue/profit.
In this case, though, state and/or county governments. Who are reluctant — or even not allowed — to change out their infrastructure for much longer than that. Gear and lever voting machines hung on for decades despite known inaccuracy problems.
Shasta County, CA is going to be interesting. The county commission has said no machine counting, hand counts only. The county recorder has said the budget’s not adequate to hire/train enough people to meet the state requirements for speed and audits by hand. If the commission backs off to just “no Dominion machines”, there’s probably not enough money to buy a full new set (and certify if necessary/possible) either.Report
I’ve thought all along that the big hurdle to a settlement wasn’t the monetary amount, but how much apologizing and changes in practice Dominion was going to demand of Fox to let them out of the trial.
The part of me that occasionally believes in conspiracy theories thinks that $1.6B is a reasonable price to make centralized machine counting of paper ballots untenable. Forcing in-person voting is a necessary step to enable broader voter suppression.Report
There’s already been a judicial determination that knowingly Fox broadcast lies about Dominion. So I guess the questions remaining are:
1) How much money and goodwill did Dominion lose?
and
2) How likely are punitive damages?
These aren’t the kinds of questions I’d want to be confronting if I were Fox.
I heard a report on NPR irresponsibly speculating this morning that the issue in today’s talks were going to include the nature and wording of an apology. In most cases I handle (fellow lawyers feel free to chime in) there are never any apologies at all.Report
I have a case now where one of the sticking points is the other side’s insistence that my client disavow the results of a fair investigation that we were required by federal law to perform and apologize for doing it at all.Report
Sorry about that. Walgreen’s has a special this week on headache relief medicine if that helps.Report
It does seem surprising how many court cases come down to “I want that guy to admit in public that he’s a big dumbhead meanie” (and how many court actions would be resolved or avoided if people just did it)Report
I think apologies are probably more common in defamation trials than others.Report
If I were Dominion I wouldn’t be looking for an apology. I’d be looking for a public admission of guilt, broadcast regularly, and enforceable promises to keep it from happening again.
Long ago I worked for one of the pieces after the Bell System was broken up. Part of that particular piece was somewhat lax about following the rules of the consent decree. That attitude changed rapidly the day the judge told the CEO of that piece, who had been required to appear in court, “If you guys are in my courtroom again because you can’t follow the rules, I will put you personally in jail for contempt for a few months.” All of Fox News’s behavior would change similarly fast if not doing so meant Ruport was going to jail for a few months. Ruport’s not going to jail for Hannity or Carlson.Report
Dominion is not part of the resistance. They are a corporation looking to put some polish back into the brand and to recoup lost cash flow/diminished value.Report
If Dominion is telling its lawyers this is what they’re looking for, the lawyers are telling Dominion to return to Earth. You can’t look in a settlement for something you can’t get if you win outright — unless you make a big concession on something you can get.Report
They settled. We don’t know how much for just yet:
Excuse me, I need to go buy a Costco-sized bin of popcorn.Report
I saw $787 million or so.Report
Back from meetings. Yes, I see that number now also.
That moment between the gathering on the first day for pretrial motions and when the jurors walk into the box is the last best opportunity to settle. And nearly every trial lawyer who was convinced they had a good case will join me in bristling at the instruction from the client to go explore settlement at that point in time anyway — and then complying and doing what you know is in the client’s best interests.
Also, I believe it was Saul above who said: “Dominion is not part of the resistance.” This was right when he said it, and now it is proven.Report
This strikes me a unlikely to work.
California power companies roll out fixed-rate bill proposal
I’m mostly thinking “too good to be true” with a little “we’ll make it up on volume” on top of that.Report
They’re just juggling the accounting. Following down the links, it appears California has previously required all costs to be loaded into the dollars-per-kWh rate. The change will shift relatively fixed costs like connections to the distribution network, back-office operations, etc into a new flat base charge. The per-kWh charge will go down as a consequence. The current scheme is implicitly progressive, since high-income customers tend to use more electricity. The new scheme for the base charge is explicitly progressive based on income. I’m pretty sure the big utilities are not going to see a decrease in revenue because of this.
Colorado’s rate structure has been fixed base charge plus usage for as long as I can remember. My current base charge is $10.65 per month, considerably less than any of the rates the California utilities are proposing. It’s about 25% of my most recent bill.Report
OH! Then that probably will work. I thought that the per-kWh would go down at first and then wander back up as people realized that their electricity costs less. (No more irritated fathers wandering from room to room turning off lights in empty rooms!)
But front-loading like that has a shot at working well. (Now we just have to see if we have grid problems again this summer.)Report
We’ll see. If you live in San Diego, the proposed rates say if you have a (presumably household) income of $70,000 per year your minimum electric bill is $73/month. To be connected. Actual electricity will be about 27 cents per kWh on top of that.
I get sticker shock from that. My electricity is, in round numbers, $11/month plus about 11 cents per kWh. If I follow through on my threat to buy an electric car and charge it at night, the off-peak rate for that will be 7.5 cents per kWh.Report
I realize that I now have a dumb question.
How do they know how much money you make?Report
Skimming quickly, the statute doesn’t seem to say.
The simplest method is to guess based on usage/address/etc and only customers who are unhappy with their assignment have to prove otherwise. The guesses are probably going to be pretty close. Proving that I’m tier 2, not tier 3, is a yes/no question that the Dept of Revenue can answer based on my state tax return.
Tons of places require you to give them your federal AGI down to the dollar. And it’s California,, not Idaho, in terms of revealing some broad information about your AGI. Although Idaho residents have to tell the state government what their federal AGI is each year.Report
Future Onion Headline:
Ron DeSantis Now Just Going Door To Door Trying To Shock People
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/17/florida-gov-ron-desantis-legislation-prison-to-battle-disney/11683191002/
“Ron DeSantis just threatened to build a state prison next to Disney World,” said Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried. “All because they don’t hate gay people.”
About that:
Gay Days returns to Disney World amid ‘don’t say gay’ controversy
Alternate Headline: Ron Flames OutReport
Freddie kicks the ever-living crap out of a weak, but not straw, man.
(I suspect that this is a case where he hasn’t argued against one person who believes all of these things, but against 5-6 people, each of whom believed some of them and he amalgamated them all.)
(Actually, now that I think about it, I *HAVE* argued against people who believed in “Defund” but not “Weaken Police Unions”. Which is really weird.)Report
Talking to imaginary lunatics is fun I suppose but back here where real people live:
In her first State of the City speech, Mayor Karen Bass announced a dramatic expansion of her signature program to move homeless people indoors, while also pledging to create “a new L.A.”
Bass said she intends to propose $250 million for Inside Safe, which has been moving unhoused residents off sidewalks and into hotel and motel rooms, as part of a $1.3-billion investment in housing and homelessness programs — an amount she called “unprecedented.”
The mayor’s full spending plan, which will cover the fiscal year that starts July 1 and still requires City Council approval, will be unveiled Tuesday morning.
…
Bass pledged to rebuild the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department, while also investing in a new Office of Community Safety, which will focus on unarmed responses to emergencies. The mayor’s speech touched on a laundry list of other topics, including climate change, paramedic response times, pothole repairs, vacancies in the city workforce and graffiti on freeways and underpasses.
Depending on the specifics of her spending plan, the mayor’s proposed budget will likely allocate more money to addressing the homelessness crisis than in previous years.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-17/bass-state-of-the-city-speech
What’s interesting is that Bass is linking crime to quality of life issue, the foundational logic of Broken Windows theory with the understanding that homelessness and crime are inextricably linked.Report
Believe it or not, Freddie addresses your criticism!
“I cannot stress enough that I regularly interact with leftists who are just as confused, obtuse, and badly defended as the theoretical leftist here. This is a parody; it is not an exaggeration.”Report
I bet he does.
The vacuum sealed world of online self appointed activists contains multitudes.
Karen Bass however is operating in the real world where policy gets made.Report
So long as we’ve moved from imaginary to only stupid bubbled people thinking that, I’m good.
Yeah, those people in those bubbles are silly and deserve criticism, don’t they?Report
As a socialist who spends a lot of time interacting with other socialists, Freddie is routinely exposed to far purer distillations of stupidity than the likes of us can imagine.Report
Freddie also lives in a world where he considers it a personal failing that everyone else, especially his former friends who were more successful than he was, doesn’t automatically agree with him on everything, immediately.
Yes, a lot of people make dumb arguments about all policies. Welcome to living in a world w/ 350 million fellow citizens. If Freddie’s that about his fellow socialists and seems to not like them very much, as his Substack that pays his bill seems to show, maybe he should move to some rural or poor smaller city and create the correct kind of socialist organization to prove all those silly, woke moralists who have supposedly destroyed the left-wing movement wrong.Report
Saw this online, thought it insightful:
It’s like Freddie is a good Christian who is criticizing Christianity.
There are a lot of Christians who want to know why Freddie isn’t spending more time criticizing the sinners instead.Report
Did Freddie lose his job at CUNY-Brooklyn?Report
He did. He wrote a little bit about it here.Report
I suppose a “let’s pretend for a moment that money is no object” starting point for policymaking is a potentially legitimate way to go. But once you’ve put together such a dream agenda, you then need to prioritize down because where real people live, there are only so many tax dollars.
Methinks Mayor Bass is going to have some trouble making the numbers line up the way they ought to pursue such an ambitious agenda.Report
What you said reminded me of this awesome tweet. The linked article is about walkable neighborhoods but the point applies to oh-so-much more.
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After a previous elaborate thank you to Walter Reed Hospital’s staff, Senator Jon Fetterman returns to duty in the U.S. Senate.
https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1648033256346984449
I have not had the sort of acute treatment that Sen. Fetterman received; I’ve been blessed to not have the sort of intense, acute attack that he seems to have suffered. Such things are potentially life-threatening, as I’ve written about previously. But I would hope that people do not confuse the reality of getting help and treatment for depression with the scurrilous rumors of mental incapacity that also surround the man. And that kind of irresponsible rumormongering is an obstacle to Sen. Fetterman serving as a more transparent example that could actually help a lot of other people regardless of their politics.Report
Sometimes you really need to think through all the possibilities before you try to own the libs:
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/3/23/23653183/abortion-wyoming-obamacare-barack-obama-supreme-court-johnsonReport
The difference between Free Speech and Assault Speech, I guess.
Just register your speech first!Report
No civilian needs speech with assault features like chiasmus, metonymy, or dangling participles.Report
Legally, you can build such word structures, but not attach them to a sentence.Report
Good news!
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This gets back to a long held central thesis of mine that our current “tools” for manipulating the economy don’t actually match up to the on the ground stats. Yes we have inflation, but we have historically low unemployment, continuous job growth and increased worker pay in a tight labor market. interest rate hikes have not yet altered any of those competing trajectories – which tells me maybe the Fed needs to sit back down and shut up for a while.Report
Which also prompts the question of “what is the problem to be fixed?”
Isn’t our current economic condition kind of the ideal?Report
The problem to be fixed is corporations paying out too much money in fixed labor costs to keep their quarter over quarter profit growth up. Or so it appears from the cheap seats.Report
It’s not sustainable. We learned back in the 70s that there’s no long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. We cannot keep unemployment permanently low by keeping inflation permanently high, and the result of trying to do so is that we get recessions anyway, and have high inflation on top of that.Report
And yet the Fed is trying to trade lower inflation for higher unemployment with its rate hikes. Jerome Powell has openly said so.Report
You measure what you want to manage. The Fed doesn’t want to deal with politico-economics of ‘good’ jobs or productivity gains vs. income vs. wealth. So they measure baselines that beget new baselines at the macro level.
The ‘problem’ with the Fed is that it doesn’t do what we think it does; and what we think it ought to do can’t be done by it.
Every article about the Fed is a wasted article about what our Political Economy ought to be doing via Congress (and the President).Report
The Fed doesn’t want to slow real wage growth. High real wage growth is good. High nominal wage growth is bad, because consistently high nominal wage growth is incompatible with 2% inflation. If the amount of money people have to spend on things is growing at 6% per year and the supply of things to spend money on is only growing at 2% per year, you’re going to get 4% inflation, give or take.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/politics/house-transgender-sports-bill/index.htmlReport
In the year 2023, Executives should be able to figure out that all-staff messages on zoom or other recorded mediums can and will be released on the internet: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/19/1170669245/millerknoll-ceo-andi-owen-video-bonuses
There was another CEO who recorded a message about his four day in the office policy and praised an employee who sold the family dog so he could return to the office.
Though I guess you can argue that the executives think they have elite impunity and all the apologies issued after the leaks are more about “How dare the peons release the zoom video!!!” and/or non-apology apologies.Report
As you may recall, my practice is employment litigation. A macro-observation I’ve made to employers: gruntled workers will put up with things that violate the law. But once you disgruntle them, they will seek out something to complain about, and sometimes they’re right. Worse, it’s VERY hard to re-gruntle a disgruntled worker. So your best policy is to keep ’em gruntled.
Taking to Zoom and telling workers that they aren’t getting bonuses but they should move out of Pity City is an excellent way to disgruntle workers. Especially if they can read in the 10-Q that you paid yourself a bonus.
Tell them that the way to get their bonuses back is to sell the family dog and work more? You’re lucky you don’t have a spontaneous strike.Report
The dog selling story was from a different CEO: https://gizmodo.com/clearlink-ceo-clarke-sell-your-dog-for-the-office-1850353910
Some one else on another blogged opined “the percentage of adults who can protectively modulate their behavior against the risk of future exposure has got to be in the single digits.”
He could very well be right.Report
Thus, my friend, we are guaranteed employment.Report
From AdAge:
BUD LIGHT’S MARKETING LEADERSHIP UNDERGOES SHAKEUP AFTER DYLAN MULVANEY CONTROVERSY
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We’ll never know how much of the Mulvaney thing was her fault, but wow that was a rough first year.Report
I know you’re quoting, but it’s worth reminding people that the thing being described is not actually a ‘controversy’ in any sense of that word. A controversy is a dispute of some sort.
A dispute would require some sort of stated ‘other side’, and weirdly, the people having the meltdown don’t seem to want to clearly say what that other side is, so…we’re forced to assume there isn’t one.Report
The Supreme Court has some common sense and stays the preliminary majority injunction against the abortion pill with Thomas and Alito dissentingReport
I’m not surprised. I didn’t think Roberts or Kavanaugh would be willing to hang their hats on this garbage legal reasoning. I would imagine Barrett would but she doesn’t feel any need to signal as such.Report
I wonder what sort of dumbass position Thomas and Alito have used to justify ‘The government did not do enough specific regulation when releasing this drug for public use so it makes sense to forbid _everyone_ from having it’, a position that I am sure is super-conservative somehow.
“Federal law disallows taking specific drugs, unless a regulation allow people to do it, but the rule making here somehow wasn’t tight enough despite appearing to follow the law in every way, and thus we hereby uphold a nationwide injunction negating that regulation and banning that action completely.”
Like, seriously, try to imagine _any other_ situation in which those two decide to ‘Government rule-making was not strict enough here and the procedure creating a rule allowing a person to do something should have been tighter, ergo that it is fine for some random judge to void that permission literally everywhere.’
“Federal law disallows dumping waste into the river, unless a regulation allows a company to do it, but the rule making here somehow wasn’t tight enough despite appearing to follow the law in every way, and thus we hereby uphold a nationwide injunction negating that regulation and banning that action completely.”
Their willingness to go along with the injunction is blatant naked partisanship.Report
It is. I don’t see how they could try and make a decision upholding this clusterfish of an original opinion in any way that doesn’t reads as “We were put in this job to eliminate access to abortion and now we will do so at the earliest opportunity.”
Fortunately I have doubts that Roberts and one other justice will play along. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch seem possible defectors.Report
The written dissent was apparently Alito sniping at other justices about the ‘shadow docket’ where the court makes procedural decisions like this one without writing an opinion explaining them.
On the larger issue no one knows what rationale but it’s worth remembering that Thomas has regularly cast doubt on the constitutionality of the administrative state altogether. It’s possible it could have something to do with that but without an opinion we don’t know.
When I was in law school I recall my admin law prof saying something like ‘there is an argument that none of this is constitutional, but only one person actually believes it. nevertheless it’s critical you understand what it is, since that one person happens to be a justice of the supreme court.’Report
It sure is weird the time he complains about that is when it’s an outcome he doesn’t like like instead of all the times he’s gone along with them.
And it sure is weird how he’s complaining about one that _objectively_ needed to be decided nearly immediately because there literally were two conflicting nation-wide injunctions. I’m against the ‘shadow docket’ as much as anyone, but if there ever was a situation where the Supreme Court needed to hurry and weigh it, it was where one Federal judge barred something for the entire nation and another Federal judge stepped in and overrode them, creating a completely unclear legal situation! The Court did need to say something there, _really quickly_. If anything, it took too long!
This is a little different than other uses of the shadow docket where the court just inexplicably decides not to hear a case.
Now, I had assumed he wanted to rule the other way (Which is the actual true thing), but if he made it about ‘How dare we quickly rule on this!’, well, that’s a frankly absurd position.
But…let’s step back for a second: Why would the management and operations of the court actually impact the _correct_ decision here? He’s free to _snipe_ at the other members of the court, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t actually Do The Right Thing and strike down this absurd judical overreach. Right? But instead, he dissented.
I.e., he appears to have thought that ‘People in this body are hypocrites’ somehow justifies an _obviously wrong_ judicial decision on his part out of spite?
Or, to be clear as to actual reality: He wanted to justify an obviously wrong judicial decision and decided that ‘This body is being hypocritical’ was a justification for it.Report
Oh, and as for Thomas:
Without the administrative state, mifepristone isn’t illegal.
How on earth would the (bogus) justification the original judge used of ‘The FDA did not test this drug well enough and thus should not have scheduled it like it did’ make sense in a philosophical framework of ‘The FDA should not have that authority to start with’?
Is his premise that the FDA isn’t allowed to authorize drugs, and thus _all_ of them should be illegal? Cause that doesn’t sound right. Or that it isn’t allowed to authorize drugs and thus all of them should be legal? But…if that’s the case…
Like I said, there is literally no way to reach any sort of ‘conservative jurisprudence’ position from ‘The government did not do enough testing of this drug as required by law when regulating this drug and thus should have kept it illegal’.Report
One wonders how Thomas would expect the President to faithfully execute the laws absent an administrative structure . . .Report
Except Alito complaining about the shadow docket is extremely rich, textbook example of It’s okay when you are RepublicanReport
Yea I don’t get it especially in a case that should so obviously be reversed. Of course a number of things I used to think were obvious apparently arent with this court so who knows.Report
Could someone explain why the Comstock acts don’t apply?Report
Well, from a “reasonable and prudent person” standpoint its about mailing obscene printed material across state lines. Last I checked regulated pharmaceuticals don’t count as obscene and you’d be hard pressed to define them as written materials . . . .Report
The Comstock acts also specifically outlaw abortifacients as far as I can tell.Report
Good news!
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CHP is short for Can’t Handle PolicingReport
Believe.
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Well, it is less likely the National Guard will quiet quit like police departments do when they don’t get what they want.Report
I suppose that’s true.
Hey. This is an opportunity to weaken Police Unions…
Should we move forward on that or would we rather start talking about Trump and his various hangers-on?
Because, from where I sit, I would *LOVE* to start talking about the importance of weakening (if not eliminating) police unions.
But if you’d like to change the topic to something else, I guess that I’d be down with that too.
It *IS* Friday night, after all.Report
Obviously we should weaken or eliminate police unions, but that is very difficult to do both politically and legally.Report
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An bleak non-sequitur.Report
We get a world where police with strong unions fail to do their jobs.
Or fail to do what their job ought to be. Maybe they’re succeeding at what their job actually is.
And we’re going to get more and more of this in the meantime.Report
All potentially true, and irrelevant to the reality that busting the police unions is difficult to do for both political and legal reasons.Report
Looks perfectly rational. Good for Target, taking effective measures to reduce shoplifting.Report
Oh, I would agree that it makes perfect sense.
Much better than the store closing.Report
If you were disappointed that Dominion settled with Fox and are looking for a law-geek-culture-and-politics fix, good news! The ACLU is defending Afroman. Once again, on the side of the righteous.Report
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Report
Chicago Tribune’s Jake Sheridan reports:
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I’m in the 70%, myself.
But I went to a commuter college.
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