Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That's hysterical. I've seen it in person, up close -- that look of horror when the person who thinks he has leverage suddenly realizes there is no negotiation taking place. The way the person's ego deflates in an instant is amusing. But not as amusing as having a recording like a text thread, showing the progression in detail.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Or the Judge Smails' treatment. "How about you and your spouse come out to our exclusive club and have dinner with us?"

How about you fucking shoot me instead? First, I've been a members-only club before. I was not born in a cave on Mars. The specials will be -- lemme guess -- crab cakes and prime rib? Second, the idea of spending a Saturday night with people I see in the office is as enticing as a colonoscopy.

You wanna grab a drink after work? Fine. Tempered with cocktails, I can tolerate pretending to care and finding you interesting for about a hour. Let's stick to borders like that.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The Zero.Zero Club doesn't see it that way. They don't vet cases by first determining if there's a pocket and limited chance of bankruptcy. That's too... logical?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

When we first opened we had 6 attorneys. I was talking to a guy who had started a patent firm 20 years earlier with 6 attorneys, and they had 60 at the time I started here. He said "do not hire your 16th lawyer, because at that point there is no way for you to know all that is going on."

We are at 22 now. Last week I was checking on a client that owed us $80,000, $40K of which was out of pockets expenses. I had them contact the client trying to get some of that in. We got an email back saying "We lost $10,000,000 in 2020 and expect to lose as much this year. We can't pay."

Then I found out the client came to my partner telling him he was looking for a new patent firm because his old firm would no longer do work for it because the client didn't pay their bills, owed them $100,000. How the fuck do you take that client?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

If they lost $10M they're paying a lot of people something. You're just not on their list.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I assume that conversation did not go well.

That stuff's a mess in the contingency world. After settlement, first firm and second firm go to war over fees.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

After the 3rd bankruptcy, who was a vendor to Donald Trump that didn't require getting paid upfront? Probably your partner.

LessinMostar, Boznia i Herzegovina

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Hi Hank, here's a book you might like. I haven't read it.

Martin Gurri
 

I'm guessing a lot of people here have heard of this. It's a cult classic in tech circles, supposedly.

But it is worth pimping, because it is fantastic: https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public.../dp/B07K6Y6KGZ

Gurri is an ex-CIA media analyst. Book was done in 2014, and pretty much predicted the "populist" surge that followed since 2016. He's since updated it with a lengthy chapter addressing Brexit, Trump, etc.

It's quite insightful. His assessments are not political, but technical. His main thesis is that govt is not longer truly in control because it has lost a monopoly on information and narrative creation. The "public" as he defines it is not in control either. It is, however, armed with tons of information, able to delegitimize the govt (or "elites," as he states somewhat sarcastically) at every turn. The problem is this "public" has no set of plans for a replacement of the current institutions. All it can do, from Occupy, to the Arab Spring, to Italy's Five Star party, is negate whoever is in charge, throw them out of office and replace them with another incompetent regime.

His final point is that the public is unrealistic -- it expects too much from govt and is impatient when it doesn't receive its Utopian desires. He sees a future in which local communities dominate more, are more connected and yet atomized, and in which information flattens hierarchies. The "pyramid of power" currently in place won't disappear, as bureaucrats and politicians and corporate actors have too much invested in it to allows its disintegration. But de facto, it will have less and less power.

Or, alternatively, he sees the possibility of the "elite" structures stamping down on the public via repression. But he sees that as unlikely, as information and distrust - even among members of the governing classes - has made that kind of coordinated action nearly impossible.

The book is highly engaging and a very easy read. The guy's humility despite his obviously enormous knowledge and powers of insight also makes him eminently likeable. If you dig Ian Bremmer, his voice is similar.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

I'll put it on my list, but first i have to read about the kinds of roses George Orwell and Elton John raised, respectively, and why.....

Re: Martin Gurri
 

The government has never had a monopoly on information or narrative creation, so whatever it lost, that's not it.

IMO, governments lost a lot of legitimacy after the 2008 financial crisis. There were no consequences for rich people who did shady things, and they got bail-outs. There were a lot of consequences for ordinary people, and no bail-outs.

Conservatives have given up on the idea that the government can do anything other than beat on other people (other countries, immigrants, people who disagree with the police). The progressive left is primarily focused on culture-war issues that are not immediate concerns for other people. Moderate Democrats will only act cautiously in a way calculated not to really solve any problem. None of them have any promise to really change anything. All of this is at least partly true in a lot of other industrialized countries, too.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Have any of you thought about how I am really the only one that rises about the problems you mention? If we reassemble the broad geographic LT team, we have people now in positions of influence across the country. WE can make ME the next president. Can I count on your support?

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Are you using "progressive left" to distinguish from socialist left? But the lefties I see are pretty focused on health care.

It's also a little weird how little attention is paid to the very real possibility that all parents will soon have access to childcare that won't bankrupt them. Which is probably because Dems aren't fighting with each other about it.

Around these parts policing has been a major issue, with the progressive left trying to do something that is an immediate concern for a lot of people but also left a lot of room for the status quo to fear monger other people into saying no.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

His argument is that the govt had more control of a smaller media (a few networks and papers from which everyone got their news) that acted as gatekeepers and narrative creators.

He touches on this, but not directly. His assessment is that this sort of thing (2008 bailouts) could have been gotten away with in a pre-Internet age. Post-Internet, however, the govt can't bullshit the public with some story about how the bailouts were equitable or morally defensible. The "public," as he describes the people in opposition to the govt and hierarchical institutions generally, can easily find information online to debunk such govt and industry spin, and then they can package counter-arguments which go viral. The result is a loss of control by authorities. This includes what you cite -- a loss of credibility and moral validity.

He's not a conservative. His admitted aim is to save democracy. He sees authoritarian creep and nihilism among both the masses and the "elites." He thinks the problem is that the public believes - delusionally - that it can demand and receive "fixes" for complex problems from the govt. The Trump voter thinks protectionism will bring back jobs. The progressive believes we can fix inequality and poverty other than at the margins by simply throwing money and govt intervention at them.

These things can be attempted, sure, but they will not succeed all or even a small fraction of the time. Gurri argues that govt has been lying to a credulous public about how much it can do for a long time and thus given the public unrealistic expectations of its capabilities. This creates an angry public that operates like George Steinbrenner - throwing out the Manager every four years when it doesn't get everything it wants.

Gurri thinks this is abetted by "Intellectuals Yet Idiots" (policy wonks who think in the abstract but fail in the practical and concrete) who populate a lot of govt and institutions. These people can never admit being wrong or having limitations because their brand is being right about everything (smartest guys in the room syndrome). Secondly, politicians generally can't admit being fallible because the deluded public - again, unrealistically - will not accept that. No one can tell the truth: "This is a policy we think will work, but there's a chance it will fail."

He argues that what we need most from our leaders is humility. And what we need most from the public is circumspect thinking, tolerance for failure, and maturity.

He writes on this problem. But if you really want to see someone attack this issue in a comprehensive manner, Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit is the book for you. Sandel asserts that merit is becoming a back door into which something like an old school English class system, aiding exclusively the upper middle to affluent classes, is infecting American society, masked as defensible and just based on arbitrary metrics, a crooked education system, and legacy hierarchies (industry and govt) in which the same people with the same badges hand each other positions.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

It was not just the “status quo” (whatever that means in this case) that was deeply concerned about the ballot amendment to defund the police. (This is an oversimplification of the ballot amendment, but it will do for now.) The ballot amendment deeply split the black and economically-challenged neighborhoods that are actually the ones most likely to be affected by the amendment, because these neighborhoods are not only the most likely to be victims of abusive policing, but also the most likely to be affected by mobile drug dealing, gang violence, etc., etc. The City Council was (rightly, in my opinion) harshly criticized for rallying behind empty “defund” rhetoric without having done the hard work of figuring out what that meant or how they would would keep the most vulnerable neighborhoods safe once they defunded the police and, most egregiously, without seeking any meaningful input from black community leaders in these neighborhoods. It did not help when the City Council president went on CNN and, when asked what people were supposed to when their house was being broken into, responded that this question came from a place of privilege, immediately making her a cartoon meme of the fear-mongering right. It also did not help that she lived in a neighborhood in South Minneapolis far less likely to actually be impacted by home invasions and other violent crime than the city’s north side.

“The debate has also played out among racial and geographical lines — with many Black residents of north Minneapolis accusing liberal White residents of south Minneapolis of supporting ‘an experiment’ that could prove harmful to Black residents as they are trying to be better allies in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ot-initiative/

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Whoops, gotta stop you right there as defunding the police was not on the ballot. (yes, I saw your parenthetical).


So, there are two frustrating things about this very common take. First, it does not acknowledge the years of work from city staff, including a detailed analysis of 911 calls and the resources necessary to respond to them, and the various non-police resources being stood up across 7 city departments. They absolutely have been doing the work. They just don't have the final org chart for the proposed department of public safety because the city attorney told them they couldn't (and they do no currently have the power to create one anyway, that's what the amendment was for).

Second, nobody defunded, or was about to defund, anything. We had a whole giant flip out over an amendment that amounted to nothing more than a reorganization of city departments (yes, with the potential for fewer police in the long run).

It's super fun to credit white progressives with the longstanding work of groups like Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Fine, if you want to fight over semantics despite my disclaimer, here is the actual wording on the ballot:

“Shall the Minneapolis City Charter be amended to remove the Police Department and replace it with a Department of Public Safety that employs a comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions by the Department of Public Safety, with those specific functions to be determined by the Mayor and City Council by ordinance; which will not be subject to exclusive mayoral power over its establishment, maintenance, and command; and which could include licensed peace officers (police officers), if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety, with the general nature of the amendments being briefly indicated in the explanatory note below, which is made a part of this ballot?”

I’m not saying no work was done, but to argue that we were just an org chart away from a functioning plan as to how this new Department of Public Safety was going to effectively replace the Police Department seems hopelessly naive to me.

The fact that there were minority groups that have long been trying to defund (or reorganize or abolish or whatever word you want to choose) is not something that I disputed. The point of the quote that I pulled out of the article was that many black people from the north side, including many vocal longstanding black community leaders, felt disenfranchised from this movement that was supposedly in large part about helping them. And whether you agree that they were or not, the fact that many of them felt this way was a huge problem. Which was probably why the wards on north side actually voted AGAINST the amendment.

https://www.minnpost.com/elections/2...lot-questions/

And this was the point I was addressing. The frustrating and very common take that the ballot amendment was defeated because of fear mongering by the status quo (and there was certainly plenty of right-wing fear mongering), ignores all of the above problems.

There was a moment in the wake of the Floyd murder where there could have been real change to address the horrific and ongoing history of abusive police practices in the Twin Cities, including due to the fact that we had (and have) a black police chief who at least appears to want widespread systemic change within the department. And I am not saying how that change should have occurred. Maybe it was to replace the Police Department, maybe it was to reign in a corrupt police union, maybe it was to work within the existing system, maybe it was some combination of the above. But I’m afraid the whole thing was horribly botched and the moment may have been lost.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Re: Martin Gurri
 

They did, but in nowhere near the proportion of the no vote in the Golden Crescent (or whatever you want to call it).

Meanwhile, the strongest support was in the diverse communities of the central city (and on campus). The racial politics on this were complex.

But wait, our re-elected Mayor has sworn he's for real reform?? (He's not, so you're right to lament missing the opportunity).

I'm honestly not clear where that appearance comes from or, if it is an accurate description of what's in his heart, that he actually has any power to create that kind of change.

There is no reigning in the police department while the charter ensures them full employment, while they are immune from city council policymaking because they can credibly threaten the mayor's reelection. If we're being honest, there may be no doing it anyway.

That said, it's a bit amazing the mayor got reelected amid a sick out and work slowdown.

I'd be OK with replacing
 

all or part of the CLE system with a version of the Squid Game. https://www.slashfilm.com/img/galler...1636401869.jpg

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Yes, unless you're asking me to fundraise.

No.

I'm not seeing anyone talking about healthcare or childcare.

What is the progressive left trying to do about policing? I hear slogans like "Defund the Police" that seemed designed to lose moderate support and not get anything concrete done.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Re: Martin Gurri
 

OK, and my argument is that the government never had "control" in any sense of a smaller media. As I've said here before, when media technology (printing presses, TV stations) was relatively expensive, you tended to have fewer outlets and they had financial incentives to be centrist to capture broad audiences and sell ads. More recently, the costs of publication have dropped, and you have media outlets chasing niche audiences instead, which changes their incentives. None of that has anything to do with government control.

Government failures on important issues are not easily bullshitted away. See, e.g., Vietnam or the Great Depression. It's not like people were stupid and then the internet came along.

I wasn't saying he was a conservative or even talking about him. His "admitted aim" is to save democracy? That's not much of an admission. I think most conservatives believe they are saving democracy, but they also have convinced themselves that democracy has been hijacked by a bunch of people who are not legitimately part of the community. There is a strong conviction that Democrats are stealing elections by letting illegal immigrants vote.

Do they? Is the problem that the public expects too much from the government, or is the problem that hard problems are hard to solve?

Bringing back jobs is hard. They went somewhere else for a reason.

Fixing inequality and poverty is hard. A lot of people like inequality.

This is a nice story, but have you considered an alternative explanation? Some voters like change, and will vote for the opposition. Some voters always vote for the same party, but they are more energized to vote against the opposition than to vote for their own party, so they turn out more when the other party is in power. Both of those are real phenomena that explain why elections go back and forth.

Also, your "every four years" point needs some thought. Presidents who run for re-election usually get re-elected. Trump was an exception, because he was so terrible, but before him you have to go back to 1992 and George H.W. Bush. And I would wager that Obama would have beat Trump in 2016, if he hadn't been term-limited.

What does go back and forth is Congress. Part of that is that off-year elections favor Republicans, because a lot of people turn out to vote only in presidential elections, and they skew Democratic. But that's another feature explaining flip-flop results that has nothing to do with your guy's theory.

Is it a newsflash that politicians oversell? Is this not a feature of most advertising? Do people lose faith in companies and consumer goods because the products they buy have been oversold?

That's an excellent idea. Let's elect a new public.

At the risk of outing myself (ha), I have taken a class from Sandel. He's smart. But is the problem "merit"? If you think for a second about what you say about, the problem is not "merit," it's that the upper middle class (etc.) have real advantages because they have more money. If you go to Scarsdale H.S., you're going to get a better education and better opportunities than if you go to P.S. 123 in the Bronx. How many kids from Scarsdale go to Harvard (hi Hank!), and how many from your average public school in the Bronx go there? The issue is not a Harvard degree is an arbitrary metric, the issue is that a Harvard degree tends to signal some measure of qualification, Jared Kushner aside. (Is it a perfect measure of merit? Of course not. But nothing is.) Everyone pays lip service to merit, but there are an awful lot of policies out there that undercut it, like funding public education locally, which ensures that people who live in expensive neighborhoods don't have to share their schools. The problem is not merit, it's an insufficient commitment to it.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

I am not sure what any of this even means.

George Floyd was murdered with no good reason, but there were times in his life he did shit that called for a response from someone carrying a gun.

I've heard of keeping social workers around to send on calls for the mentally ill, which sounds nice, I guess, for bigger cities. But my suburb isn't keeping social workers around 24/7, and it seems the worst police abuses are in smaller cities? Plus, too often the mentally ill are armed, so I'm not sure a social worker is the answer.

The two most poignant moments I can recall on LT are 1 Fringey's accident, and 2 Adder posting during the George Floyd riots. He had a post about how he spent the night on his front porch holding a baseball bat. I have never felt more empathy for anyone on here (well maybe Slave for the whole paigs thing?). But if the mob had come to his home the bat would only have made things worse. I know the Twin Cities po-po was ignoring the riots, but in theory Adder needed a force of armed people those nights.

The answer has to be integrating police forces more and being more selective about whom is given a badge I think.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

There are two ways a person can say another is smart- one can recognize another has intelligence far beyond their own. Or one can be so much smarter than one can quantify the other as being "smart" to a certain level. Which was your statement here? I'm from the 313 equivalent of tobacco road, so I have "merit" to my Harvard/Yale/Stanford degrees.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

I don't know what the "progressive left" has to say on policing. Doesn't seem like a big issue for them.

"Defund the Police" is a long-standing slogan of Black police abolitionists, that it became really popular to for comfortable Dems to critique as bad politics.

It remains the case that we should be limiting the instances where we send armed men with guns to where they are actually needed and that's we've allowed the solution of armed men with guns to expand to the degree that they are our only public safety resource.

Locally, it will be interesting to watch whether our mayor, who ran on reform, will kill all of our pre-existing reform plans or not. (He didn't really mean reform, he meant the status quo)

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Jesus, man, you're smarter than this.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

9 members (a veto-proof majority) of the city council stood on that stage and pledged to "dismantle the MPD as we know it." Because the activists who organized the event put those words on the stage, we're supposed to believe that those 9 meant to get rid of the police this fall. This is because they are all wild-eyed radicals in disguise (they are not).

Locally, we just did a multi-year, detailed analysis of 911 calls, finding that a substantial majority of them did not require someone with a gun, and that virtually none of them that started out without that need escalated to need one. Unfortunately, I don't know more details than that because it hasn't gotten much press.

That's an interesting point. Your city likely has far fewer police, per capita, than a big city. It also probably doesn't have over-policed communities.

As you note, it nonetheless likely has some super racists policing.

Flower's experience was much more harrowing than mine. He was much closer to it.

We pay one. They quit on us, and have been on a work slowdown/sick out ever since.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Actually it is a 70% dem 1 square mile suburb 2 miles north of Detroit. It is probably 90% white, but the police are 50% black. I doubt very much there are super racists on the police force, at least I hope/expect not.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

So people should just read in the wink and nod that they weren't serious?



I've somehow fallen into the groove of watching Adam 12 reruns on MeTV 5-6 weekdays. There is a weird vibe to seeing network TV trying to process drug use and hippies and race in the early 70s and still make it fun to watch!

But the policing moments are also mostly boring things that Flower and I could probably handle- until the ones happen where flower and I would be running away like crazy. None of that shit is predictable I'm afraid.


ehh, maybe, but who has empathy for flower? He's a fucking GOD! I honestly worried for you those nights because of your posts.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

It kinda makes you wonder why they run ads for new televisions. If you're watching on a television good enough to tell how awesome the picture is, you don't really need a new one.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Careful, Adder, Hank has your number on this one.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

People should read what the CMs actually said, which was that it was gong to be a process over time to change how we do public safety, not a sudden adoption of chaos.

My impression of the 911 study was the it turned out to be pretty predictable.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

A veto-proof majority of the City Council stood on a stage with the giant words “DEFUND POLICE“ in front of it and talked about dismantling the police department, and how the time for incrementalism was past. The notion that nobody was supposed to believe that they actually intended to defund the police is quaint, and if they were not being serious, the irony was lost on many:

“Last June, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members pledged to defund and dismantle the police department.”

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/10002...rm-have-soften

“Over three months ago, a majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to defund the city’s police department, making a powerful statement that reverberated across the country.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/u...nd-police.html

When everyone learned that there were no specific plans, and that nobody really even knew what “defund” or “dismantle” meant (thus plunging Minneapolis into this terrible limbo where many police basically stopped stopped doing their job), some members of City Council switched course, while one embarrassingly tried to argue that he did not see the sign and did not know defunding police was on the table. (In his defense, from his perspective, he may have thought he was attending a “ECILOP DNUFED” rally.)

There is a lot of blame to go around for how this opportunity for this whole situation was mismanaged, and to put all the blame at the feet of the City Council is unfair. But they did their fair share of mismanagement, in part because it was not a popular position to acknowledge both that 1) the Twin Cities has a long and horrific history of abusive policing and that prior efforts at reform have been half-hearted and ineffectual, and 2) despite this history of police abuse, there are vulnerable communities that rely on police to keep them safe. When we were discussing this issue probably a year ago, I talked being involved with a local domestic violence prevention organization. Many advocates there (many of whom are young progressive people of color) state that they believe they have a good working relationship with the police, and that while this was not always the case, they now largely saw the police as valuable partners who are able to respond effectively and with compassion and sensitivity to domestic violence calls to protect victims of domestic violence. It was probably two posts after this that Adder said, “It’s not like the police ever make anyone safer anyways.” I understand that this was just hyperbole on Adder’s part, but it was telling. And Adder is correct that the “Defund Police” rhetoric was distorted by a fear-mongering right who wanted people to believe that any attempts to rethink policing would result in a swift devolution to nihilism. But, to blame the failure of the ballot amendment on a “fear-mongering status quo” misses a whole lot of the story.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

For Sebby.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

You watch commercials. You're smarter than that- and I have the ability to quantify how smart.

edit: we both have old guy eyesight now, so we don't need new ones BTW.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Right after Adder explained that police never make anyone safer I posted a news story about the Detroit mayor's request for white suburban "progressives" to stop coming into the city for BLM marches. See those marches required police presence as they did turn violent in some cities. so because D's police were baby sitting Biff's social statement marching there were fewer po po patrolling the largely black neighborhoods and shootings were spiking. So there was one way police were making things safer, until they couldn't.

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Did you see this one? It's too bad they'll be tied up and not able to do this kind of policing. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...al-type=earned

Re: Martin Gurri
 

I'm going out, so I only had time to read a little bit. In the part I read two young black men were shot to death for no good reason. Does the rest of the article get to proving we don't need armed police, because social workers could better handle this stuff?

Re: Martin Gurri
 

Well, the rest of it compounds the tragedy by jailing three innocent kids while the guilty party goes off and kills again.

It wasn't my point, but if the question is can social workers do better, I would say, in this case, yes, but then again, it's so bad even lawyers could do better.