A lot of decisions made with A/B testing are also made with insufficient relevant data, but it's less obvious since it's easy to think the A/B results cover everything.
The Apple Vision still needs to get two or three times better preferably with an M6 or M6 processor, whoops, more memory, faster SSD, thunderbolt five etc. oh and it needs to be $1500 Hmm… not possible for another two years? With better software.
And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.
A significant chunk of the population thinks they'll get tortured for eternity if they do it too much, and finds it distressing to be exposed to it as a result.
perhaps obviously, i am not and never have been religious. your comment brings up a point that i have never really thought about: why is it mostly religious people that are against swearing?
does the bible or any religious text specifically call out swearing (beyond taking their gods name in vain, which i can understand avoiding if you are religious)?
Many religious texts have broader restrictions on word usage than just their deity's name in vain. Usually those are adjacent to other aspects of the religion. I am not aware of any that would forbid what we would commonly call swear words.
There's a number of verses in the New Testament which arguably instruct people not to swear. Colossians 3:8 is probably most on point, although as with all cross-cultural comparisons of foul language, it's hard to know exactly what a Greek speaker 2000 years ago would have understood αἰσχρολογία to mean in the context of modern English.
It's the same motivation as racists: they need some way to feel superior to the people that they despise. If the entire world stopped swearing today, these people would just find something else to use in their supremacist proxy wars.
The amount of the judgment seems reasonable for years of harassment against a bunch of people, all done for a profit, plus a bunch of egregious misbehavior in court.
Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
Yes, by definition, you do. It is not illegal to slander anyone. The police cannot arrest you for this, you can't be convicted and sentenced to anything.
Those people won a tort (in theory), because he caused them damages that he was responsible for making remedying.
Slander is a tort. Not a crime. No one can punish you for slander. The government isn't allowed to incarcerate you for slander, to fine you for slander, and once the court case is over, they do not attempt to put any obstacles in front of you to prevent you from slandering in the future.
You merely have to pay any damages you cause someone else. You truly have a child's grasp of these things.
The court case itself isn't a criminal trial. It's dispute resolution. Someone claims that another caused them damages, the court is empowered to provide remedy to those damages if the claims are found to be true. How does anyone make it to adulthood not knowing this?
When corporations are sued, they tend to take the lawsuits seriously, which is probably a big factor in why their outcomes are so different than Jones'.
I mean, yeah, but the subtext of the preceding comment was that corporations have done stuff like Bhopal, which while not as luridly evil as what Jones did was still objectively worse as a civil offense cognizable to a court of law.
But when a corporation does something like Bhopal, you can generally count on them hyperprofessionally attending to every detail of the ensuring tort case. Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
> Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
I'm curious why you'd bring up those corporate crimes and not think that the obvious response would be that corporate crimes obviously need greater liability, Rather than Jones needing less.
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
>I'm curious why you'd bring up those corporate crimes and not think that the obvious response would be that corporate crimes obviously need greater liability, Rather than Jones needing less.
Sure, some company poisons the groundwater with hexavalent chromium: let's fine them $2800 quintillion. That makes sense to me. I mean, it makes sense to you, right? I know that it must make sense to you, because I actually do see evidence of stupid shit thinking like this out in the real world all around me.
When you levy fines/awards that could never hoped to be paid in any real-world circumstances, you're not levying fines (or awards) at all, you're trying to fabricate a scenario, as a judge, to stop them from existing or doing what they do. And it isn't without consequence.
Here's an example... a judge sits at a bail hearing, finds out the arrestee is a cannibal murderer that eats babies, the cops found him with a half-eaten baby still screaming in his mouth but the doctors weren't able to save it. Does he deny bail, like a reasonable human being does? No, "Bail's set at $10 million!". You're happy because that monster will stay in jail until the trial. But now every other defendant will have their bail mysteriously drift higher, until you're crying that bail is unjust (it's not) because someone shoplifts and the bail is $50,000. And you just seem profoundly incapable of seeing this causal chain. Bail, for instance, was only ever meant to secure someone's appearance at trial. By definition it needs to be a high enough amount that they'd rather lose out on the money than skip the trial, but low enough that they can scrape together the money at all. Done correctly, there are amounts that carefully (but narrowly) find that overlap. But because apparently no one gets that or can get that, everything's fucked up beyond all sanity.
Awards are like this too. By setting the award too high, these people will never even get a fraction of it (the damages they suffered will never get recompense), and rather than incentivizing Jones' future good behavior, they pushed him into even more noxious and socially maladjusted behavior and have inspired some sort of narcissist-martyr complex beyond even that which he was already making the world suffer for.
That's why I didn't bring it up. Because it's a dumb idea that totally misunderstands everything.
Surely there's a number between $2800 quintillion and whatever low number actually gets awarded that would make sense.
The actual damages awarded here is about $64 million per plaintiff, which is a lot, but not utterly absurd. If we used that amount for your chromium hypothetical, the company would need to have killed about 44 trillion people. This is, I'm reliably informed, more people than there actually are. A reasonable amount for damages in the groundwater case would be whatever it costs to either clean it up or take ownership of the affected land. If it's discovered after it has already hurt people then it needs to include damages for those people.
It doesn't really compare with bail. As you say, the purpose of bail is to ensure appearance at trial. The purpose of tort awards is to compensate for damages, and sometimes to punish. Bail is set based on the defendant: how likely are they to flee, what sort of means do they have? Damages are set based on the consequences of the tort: how much damage was there, does the person deserve additional punishment on top?
If a person has $100, then setting bail above $100 doesn't make any sense. It's equivalent to no bail. Awarding more than $100 in damages makes sense, because they can obtain more money later. Even if they don't, you're meant to award based on damages, not ability to pay. If the damages were $1,000 then the award should be $1,000 regardless of whether the person is a hobo or Jeff Bezos.
> But it wasn't a low award. Are you unaware, or are you thinking that awards above $1.4 billion is low?
That was referring to dumping chromium. You said you've seen such judgments be tiny fractions of what was awarded against Jones. When I said maybe that means those judgments should be higher, you came up with this ridiculous $2800 quadrillion number. I'm saying, perhaps there is some reasonable number that is less than $2800 quadrillion but more than the low numbers you've seen.
> If we divided it among 1.4 billion people, it'd only be a buck each. How can it be high if it's just one dollarino per person?
If Jones had damaged and been sued by 1.4 billion people, and lost, then $1.4 billion would indeed be an extremely low award. But he wasn't.
Again, it's about actual damages, not assessing the moral severity of the injustice against the defendant's ability to pay. The jury determined that Jones damaged these specific plantiffs to a degree equivalent to a bit under a billion dollars. You can certainly disagree with that, but "if we divided it among 1.4 billion people" doesn't make a lick of sense. If 1.4 billion people were damaged to a degree that worked out to $1/person, then it would be the correct award. Nothing to do with Jones' ability to pay or how many people it's divided among.
> I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
I was a juror once for a civil case that lead to some fairly significant harm. It was a very odd experience to have to put a dollar to it at the end. The plaintiff attorney gave us numbers for the damages but the defense at the end just basically said "if you decide against my client, just be reasonable" which means we had to just kind of put a dollar value to everything. Some of it like estimates of labor lost were easy, but having to put a dollar value to the pain of a severe injury wasn't something any of us really felt prepared for.
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
>Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
And if he had been fined $35 million dollars, the example would have been set, they'd have been paid, and he'd have spent the next 20 years figuring out how much that award fucked him when he couldn't be insured for anything, when no one would touch him for any sort of gig worth having. He might have ended up destitute. But if you do the Dr. Evil "1 billion dollars!" thing, which he could never actually pay, the plaintiffs get nothing for all their misery, and the money he does hide in offshore accounts is there for him to loaf around on forever. Why is this so counterintuitive for everyone?
> He might have ended up destitute. But if you do the Dr. Evil "1 billion dollars!" thing, which he could never actually pay, the plaintiffs get nothing for all their misery, and the money he does hide in offshore accounts is there for him to loaf around on forever. Why is this so counterintuitive for everyone?
He was busy hiding millions of dollars in assets well before the judgements were handed down [0]. He fraudulently declared bankruptcy in multiple shell companies to try and delay the proceedings [1]. He made no secret of the fact that he was going to do everything in his power to avoid giving a single dime to the Sandy Hook families, regardless of the outcome. He had known for years that he was lying, his own staff had repeatedly raised objections to his behavior in writing, and if the award was $35 million, that's only a few year's profits for him to sacrifice. For reference, his personal expenses are $100k/mo [2] and his previous salary was $1.4 million/yr [3]. On Infowars' best days, they would rake in $800k in profit [4]. Sure, those $800k days weren't super often, but they are still a cartoonishly profitable business by every measure. $35m would not be a real punishment.
It should also be noted that $1.4b is the combined amount for all of the plaintiffs, not just one person. And this isn't an isolated incident; he's been defaming people his entire career, and every time he got a small judgement or was only required to apologize, he just went on to defame other people [5], and all the times he didn't get sued he never even apologized. He only cares about money, so that's how you send a message to him.
Edit: I completely forgot to mention that the Sandy Hook families did offer to settle: $85 million paid over 10 years [6]. Jones countered with $55 million [7]. If Jones and his companies could afford $5.5m/yr, that says a lot about the profitability of the operation and the inadequacy of $35m.
Alex Jones did not, as far as the evidence we have seen, harass the parents. Alex Jones did not direct anyone to harass the parents.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
That's understating things rather substantially. He ignored court orders. He continued to defame the plaintiffs during the trial, including a statement on air that one of the plaintiff's death by suicide was actually a murder and part of the conspiracy.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
That might have been his objective really. All that talk about the govt being after us for years, and now he can point to them forcing him to sell everything off, while he still maintains the same fanbase. But what can they do, he really deserved the judgement.
In a criminal case, if you refuse to cooperate, ignore warrants, etc, the state can and will send in the police to arrest you and continue their investigation while you sit in jail.
In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.
Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, verifiably lied under oath, committed bankruptcy fraud to delay the proceedings, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.
If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.
In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, defaming the victims during the trial and chasing away every competent attorney he had, leaving him with Norm Pattis (CT trial) and Andino Reynal (TX trial), attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.
The real kicker is that defamation law is full of snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't even keep one of those around speaks volumes.
Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He and Free Speech Systems then declared bankruptcy because he knew paying for the consequences of his actions was impossible, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy, everything is for sale, including the "news" outlet he ran.
Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). He got Judge Lopez to rule his Twitter account was not an asset that can be auctioned off, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by The Alex Jones Store, a company owned by one of his friends (Bigly), which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets unable to spread his message.
> Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people.
I fully support greater penalties on corporations that break the law. That said, I still view Jones' judgements as well-earned and reasonable.
But Jones did profit from the traffic and thus ad revenue that controversy stirred up, this case is about that* not about Jones right to have an opinion, but how Jones weilded it at the expense of others, no less*.
I was in a chat with people in NYC when it hit. They got advance notice, although it was just “why is everything shaking?” Followed by me going silent for a bit, so they didn’t know what was going on until it reached them.
I was thinking of the more recent quake which I very much felt and heard in my older detached home in Queens. I was in Farmingdale out in Suffolk during the 2011 quake. I got up to walk from my desk, took a few steps then suddenly became disoriented for a few seconds as if I was dizzy. Then my coworker shouts "Holy shit did you just feel that? That was an earthquake!"
Sorry, I meant the border security. I’ve generally had a good time in the US, but when you’re already get treated like crap just getting into that country, I’d rather avoid it. Plus places like the UAE don’t require any visas for transit so it’s straightforward!
Yeah, transit through the US is pretty bad. I get the impression they don't really want people doing it. They sure don't put effort into making it easy.
Indeed. And interestingly those people also believe this myth that Emirates is somehow always super luxurious. Emirates Economy is just as cattle class as all other large airlines, but with a worse safety record and having to go through Dubai. Just don't do it.
Probably referring to crew rest hours (esp. a problem in the late 2010s, near-misses at DXB etc.
Not having had passenger fatalities is a bad indicator for safety records in the 21st century.
The ek521 report is a good example documenting systemic failures at EK
Well, if not ever having a fatality isn’t good enough, they’re consistently top 10 rated for safety. I just don’t buy ops criticism. It’s fine to not like Dubai, but emirates are provably one of the best airlines.
They got lucky to keep their 0 fatalities, could have easily been 300 if one of their significant near misses went slightly different. Their crew rest rules are dangerous, Middle Eastern crew resource management is much worse than US and EASA, and airline oversight in the region is much less independent. Sure it hasn't gone wrong yet, but with how low the number of fatalities is overall that's a bad metric.
Edit: Just to quote the official investigation on an Emirates fuckup: "The flight crew reliance on automation and lack of training in flying go-arounds from close to the runway significantly affected the flight crew performance in a critical flight situation which was different to that experienced by them during their simulated training flights."
That reflects exactly how the rest of the industry thinks about the gulf carriers and their crews. Combine that with non optimal CRM and you have a disaster waiting to happen. They already did this twice, not understanding automation and (nearly) flying a jet into the ground.
There isn’t a single FAA or EASA airline in the top 5. Maybe they’re just unlucky? And emirates, which has been going since 1985, one of the busiest airlines in the world, still waiting for it to all go wrong. Delusional to try and spin this as ME bad at safety, when Qatar is the other major airline flying the region.
Industry bodies that rate airlines on safety. Last year Emirates, third equal.
The criteria is safety.
No legitimate response has been received, there's no debate here. This isn't some obscure knowledge thing, these ratings come out every year. You can go and look them up, it took me all of 15 seconds to confirm this.
And I'll even go one further, there isn't a single airline in the Americas, Africa or Europe that rates higher than Emirates on safety.
"Safety" is far too nebulous for that to be a criterion. Safety would be a conclusion reached from analyzing other factors.
I'm guessing you're referring to the rankings from airlineratings.com, since their list last year put Emirates tied for third place. They don't appear to be an industry body, or really much of anything. Their rankings get cited all over the place but I can't figure out why, other than it being convenient, and media not really caring about authoritativeness or accuracy. It's just an aviation journalist and a few employees with, as far as I can tell, no real connection to the industry.
Their list doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. They describe their methodology at https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-ratings. The rating is out of seven, with five criteria contributing one or two points each. Very coarse, but reasonable enough. Then they add on a PLUS for airlines that max out the points and also pass an onboard audit focused on safety within the cabin.
"Airlines that already excel in safety and hold a Seven Star safety rating who successfully complete these anonymous audits, conducted over six flights (including a mix of overnight, day, domestic, international, short-haul, and long-haul journeys), will earn special recognition as a Seven Star Plus airline, the highest accolade we now offer."
There's a lot of fluff and very little detail about exactly what these audits entail.
Looking at their full list of ratings, there are five airlines rated Seven Star Plus. Yet there are not five airlines tied for first place. The full list doesn't match their announcement of their top rankings, probably because things have changed since the top rankings were announced. But their methodology doesn't line up with the structure of their list at all. There are 5 airlines rated Seven Star Plus, and an additional 145 airlines rated 7/7. How, then, are they producing a ranked list of 25 that isn't just two sets of ties?
Interesting note in how they evaluate incidents: "We do not deduct stars for accidents caused by terrorism, hijacking, or pilot suicide." I can see why they'd exclude terrorism and hijacking, although I disagree with that choice. But pilot suicide? That's absolutely something that should be included. Pilot evaluation and well-being is completely within the airline's purview.
Long story short, this ranking seems like a bunch of BS.
Very interested to hear why you believe “non-threatening” to be a desirable property of the average male. Do you also believe this to be a desirable property for the average female? i.e. nobody threatens anyone else?
Why are you scare-quoting your own words and supposing it is only your interlocutor who is treating them abstractly? Just tell us what you mean. What do you mean by non-threatening? What domains?
Even nuttier is the one from the Peacekeeper. Float a perfect beryllium sphere in fluorocarbon. Use thrusters to keep it oriented. No gimbal lock, because no gimbals. Six million dollars per unit, in 1987. So good that a system with literally perfect accuracy wouldn't improve accuracy, because error from the system was already well below other sources of inaccuracy in the missile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sp...
reply