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TwiceHorn

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by TwiceHorn

  1. On a more substantive note, of the recent flurry of motions Trump filed in DC, one of the more futile was to strike the allegations in the indictment relating to the events of January 6. Chutkan poured that one out in three pages. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67656604/158/united-states-v-trump/ As her opinion and order make clear, the standard for striking such material from an indictment is rigorous, and Trump came nowhere close to meeting it. Of possibly more interest is how the government responded to the motion, which is probably said better here than I can. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213480816/trump-special-counsel-case-jan-6 Good analysis that the government is prepared to nail his ass to the wall on every bit of this.
  2. Man, I wish there was some way to make unions less susceptible to corruption. I think it's the nature of the beast, though. And, we really need them badly as a counterbalance to runaway capitalism.
  3. Yeah, my last round of car-shopping included half-tons. A big part of me didn't want to give up the amenities of my luxury sports cars, but another part of me said "this is a truck, it should have rubber floors that I can hose out." That, and the cost of the things with what I consider to be too high mileage for "gently used" told me, if I want a truck it needs to be a second/third vehicle.
  4. One of the delicious ironies of all this shit is one of the main, fairly legitimate criticisms of Roe is that it is an issue that should be left to the states. So, the states get their own abortion laws and the feds have not shit to say about it. That is the upshot of Dobbs. And the military is wholly agnostic here: they pay to let personnel travel to where they need/want to get their health care, in essentially whatever state they choose. Those same states that get to decide their own abortion laws.
  5. No, I don't think so. That would far exceed the contribution limits to individual Senators, even to the 21 of them on the Judiciary Committee. Contributions to PACs can be unlimited in certain circumstances, but those circumstances do not include directing the money to individual or groups of Senators. And because the Democrats hold the majority, some of the contribution would have had to be to a Democratic PAC. There are ways to tool that shit around, but not that far, I don't think. @Js1 or @Bateshorn maybe can confirm or deny. Besides, why would the 11 Dems on the committee take Crow's money? Even I'm not that cynical. ETA: I see that it doesn't allege that Dems took the money. Dems can issue a subpoena because they hold the majority in the Committee. The Chair of the Committee, with the agreement of the Ranking Member or by a vote of the Committee, may subpoena the attendance of a witness at a Committee or Subcommittee hearing or Committee deposition, or the production of memoranda, documents, records, or any other materials. Any such subpoena shall be issued upon the signature of the Chair or any other Member of the Committee designated by the Chair Related question, why does Crow need to pay off the Rs? They were never going to cooperate anyway. They are threatening to fuck with the spending bill to avoid the shutdown. ETA, again: The only place that is repeated anywhere on the internet seems to indicate that those are Crow's lifetime contributions to those R Senators. Long story short, that's a load of shit. I seem to recall that Lindsey Li account being pretty unreliable.
  6. Yes, China has really upped their QC game. They were quietly making a lot of knives for western companies, and a fair amount of junk on their own. Now they have adopted western standards for their own products and they are damn good. It is kind of the MO in China.
  7. Different enough and a parody, which has gained quite a bit of traction as a trademark defense these days. You're probably good. HOWEVER, those assholes still might sue, and that could be unpleasant, even though I think you'd probably win.
  8. A recent addendum to this. The PTO wants to move its system toward text-based document filing, so everything is immediately text-searchable, which makes a certain amount of sense. To date, their systems have been agnostic as to whether the pdfs uploaded were image- or text-based. But somehow they let Microsoft weasel in and sell them on a docx encoding engine and they have proposed and required that filers upload docx files instead of pdfs, or even text-based pdf-A. So, whatever you file gets run though that engine and the output is the official filing at the USPTO. Docx started as a standard, but has gone increasingly proprietary to M$ since it's introduction/adoption. So, there are valid concerns that anyone uploading a docx made with LibreOffice, etc. or even older versions of Word, may wind up with something corrupted or slightly different once it is run through M$'s encoding engine. This is monumentally important, because a patent filer is "stuck" with whatever the PTO got on the filing date. So, it appears that the PTO has been sold a bill of goods by M$ as to whether docx and their proprietary encoding engine are actually standard and not a move to get all patent practitioners to buy the latest version of Word. But it is responding to user criticism and postponing, perhaps indefinitely, the docx filing requirement. Corporate vs. government at work.
  9. Quite the conundrum, isn't it? A lot of the things we want to happen to these people for egregiously violating norms would themselves violate norms. Yes, there are ways to differentiate "norm violating," but in broad principle, it is the same thing. It's a variant of the "how do you contend with insanity" problem. The first instinct may be with your own form of insanity, and there's some appeal to that. But is it really the long-term right thing to do?
  10. I used to think government was a complete bumbling bureaucracy, by its very nature. But, people have pointed out that corporations are mostly bumbling bureaucracies, too, also by their very nature. That nature, of course, being human nature. So, we're all right on the bumbling bureaucracy score. Corporations have one advantage (or disadvantage), though. And that is, the number of stakeholders in any corporate decision or policy is relatively a lot lower than government, and, I think government does a better job of trying to accommodate its larger number of stakeholders. The main stakeholder in a corporation being profit motive, of course, which can make things damned simple if you want to view them that way and many or most corps do. Let me give a vivid example. The US Patent & Trademark Office has had online filing for a really long time. Like 20 years, way before court systems implemented it, and contemporaneously or earlier than other patent offices, including the "gold standard" European Patent Office, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. When they went online, you uploaded pdf documents, as expected. But what then happened was clerks at the PTO printed those pdfs, scanned them, and uploaded them into the file maintenence system. LOL WTF? But then I came to understand that the PTO received protests from all those clerks that would immediately become unemployed (hundreds of them, maybe even thousands) if the electronic filings were automatically uploaded to the file maintenance system. Plus, the printing out had the salutary function of providing an avenue by which the filings were reviewed for completeness (all pages there, all drawings, all legible, etc.). And for a while, they maintained parallel paper files in case of technical glitches that might lose or corrupt electronic filings. And in those early days of this type of technology, that was probably a smart thing to do. Surprisingly, very few or no instances of galactic technical failure resulting in the loss/corruption of patent filings have occurred. Over time, the PTO has moved to a more automated system where the uploads go directly into the file maintenance system. But it has done so relatively gradually, minimizing the impact on those clerk people. There were some other issues relating to making all patent documents available online in that there were cottage industries of people who made their living going over to the PTO and copying various documents for private attorneys and couriering them over. So that was slow-rolled a bit, but less so because it wasn't government employees losing their jobs. They wound up hiring one of the prime electronic contractors (that used to fax you patent documents in close to real time) to print and scan official patent documents. So, this is an example of government being "absurdly inefficient." But, you know what? The USPTO is and almost always has been self-funded by user fees (Congress takes their revenue away and gives it back, less some). So, this didn't really cost anyone any money (patent user fees have actually been going down). And the user experience has been comparatively fantastic. And some people kept their jobs instead of just being laid off had a corporate bureaucracy made those decisions. So, what I thought was complete government idiocy, at first, has a bit more nuance to it.
  11. TwiceHorn

    9-1

    Early in the season it was the opposite. In fact the talking heads were saying how we get stronger as the game goes on and win the 4th quarter. I don't know exactly what happened since then but I'm reasonably sure attrition through injuries plays a part. Yep, and announcers mentioned, both late last season and during the Alabama game as our D really asserted itself, our pretty heavy defensive rotation keeping players fresh. But, it has been pointed out that our rotation schemes sometimes leave major holes in the lineups that opponents have learned to exploit. And, injuries are probably making that worse in that it's hard to keep at least a couple really good players on the field along with the mediocre/bad ones. So what was an advantage has turned to a disadvantage with Catalon, Watts, Barron and others being injured and either out or gimpy. I think the notion that the BigXII is really down is now overplayed. That was all based on predictions and roster losses. New lineups and QBs are getting experienced and I think some of the teams are surprising people. Just like some underperformance, perhaps, of Texas players has surprised people a bit. There have been a fairly steady number of teams cracking the top 25 (and falling right the fuck out with wtf losses to teams to whom they ostensibly should not lose).
  12. TwiceHorn

    9-1

    And, if "all" kids are really looking at is NIL, what is that doing to their motivation and concentration on the field? I'm not anti-NIL or other schemes to compensate players above board. I think that's a reasonable goal. I didn't think NIL would turn players into a bunch of money-grubbing hoes, either. But I have always been worried that it would affect things on the field and in the locker room, to one degree or another, in some adverse way. And I think it's foolish to believe that it isn't or won't, even if the effect isn't obvious or grotesque. Under the NCAA's old amateurism rules, football players lived a life of minor deprivation that could function to keep them hungry for that first or second NFL contract. That's no longer true.
  13. TwiceHorn

    9-1

    Agreed. Something is still a bit off with the confidence of the team. Most of the roster now avoided the toxicity of Herman, and, although we had one "bad" season under Sark, we have improved. Culture seems to have improved. So, you'd think this team would be better at this than they are. They have certainly progressed some, but you'd think they'd have rid themselves of whatever this is by now, or at least more than it seems. As good as our roster may be (I'm not convinced that it is as great as we tend to think, yet), we seem really prone to execution errors, particularly in critical moments and particularly in the second half of games. Just some kind of lack of concentration resulting from too-easy success in the first half? Maybe it's a combination of Sark's solid early game plan leading to success, and our own mental failure to adjust to the adversity of the other team's halftime or over-game adjustments. It does seem to me that Sark is aware of these things, at least on the micro scale, because I see a lot of second-half frustration. It's not quite Saban-level, but he does a lot of yelling at clouds between squats. All that hand-wringing aside, we are clearly on an upward trajectory from the last 10 years. Hopefully, we continue to see steady improvement and this stuff falls by the wayside.
  14. Can't see the post. But yeah, you can lose at trial, file an appeal and, especially if the appeal has potential merit, settle the case for less than the trial verdict. You can threaten bankruptcy. You can claim that the plaintiff won't find enough money to satisfy the judgment in full through ordinary collections, but here's a cashier's check for less. All time-honored ways of settling a civil case. A judgment must be enforced. That doesn't mean the cops go to their house and say "cough up" or go to debtor's prison. There is almost always some uncertainty in whether you will collect the full amount of the judgment. So if a defendant offers good funds payable today, that has a lot of appeal as long as it's not too big a discount. ETA: Now I see it. Oh hell yeah they're trying to settle. The monetary amount hasn't been fixed or ascertained, so that's negotiable. Some kind of something short of a forced sale or transfer to new owners is probably what they are trying to get. As I have mentioned, I am not 100% convinced that the court of appeals will uphold the cancellation of business licenses, so even that is a bit up in the air. Something like a transfer of the properties to something not 100% Trump controlled or something. Or five years to GTFO. Who knows.
  15. Well, two eps down. It's ok, watchable. There is something hallmark-y or lifetime-y about it, but it's got more violence and implied violence than any of those I've ever seen (which aint many).
  16. I am interested in NAPERY of every description.
  17. Can white people say "chimp out"? Because it's a very amusing expression, but the racial undertones make it a bit scary.
  18. A lot of commercial pilots are engineers.
  19. The question there is, is it Sark or is it Ewers? I suppose if JT and JWhitt are the number 1 targets, or not, that's on Sark.
  20. TwiceHorn

    9-1

    I do think we have a problem with player leadership, yes.
  21. Well, we sometimes seem to execute better in a tempo offense, for whatever reason. It really does seem the longer we sit there lined up, the more likely an OL is to jump and Ewers to get into his own head or something. I tried paying attention to the play clock in the second half, and didn't always succeed. But, most of the times I did watch, it was under 20, but rarely under 10. And those plays seemed excruciating and doomed. And it does seem to give the D more time to diagnose.
  22. Had the same thought. He still distrusts Ewers a bit, and probably just about everyone else, too. Seems to be having difficulty moderating things to match the level of execution. We execute for periods of time pretty well and maybe he lets off the brake a bit and we break out in fuckups.
  23. Seems like it's becoming a thing. It's not parity, quite. But I do wonder if NIL and the portal are making players perhaps a little less intense than they might otherwise be.
  24. I suppose everyone that thinks highly of him figures how much better he would be if he fixed his mechanics. He seems resistant to that. He's good, but not as good as the top ones. Not living up to billing.
  25. That's actually probably a pretty reasonable take. Winning the B12 was achievable with a small amount of luck. Everything after that was gravy. But the notion that we had 100% fixed last year's problems was pretty ludicrous, especially considering injuries. We have made some improvements.
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