I’m pretty sure based on the structure of the deal between the Onion and the Connecticut families this basically guarantees that the families (and any other creditors I guess) take home less money. Given the amount of money that they’re owed from the Connecticut judgement those families are basically 95% of the beneficiaries of this sale, and the original deal with the Onion had them giving up a huge chunk of what they could be entitled to in order to make sure that the Texas families (who were victimized in the same way but weren’t part of the same suit and got a much lower reward from a Texas court) got $100,000 more than they would have under the next-best offer. So in order for this to end up being a gain the next-best bid would need to either be so high that giving up $1.5 billion wouldn’t be enough to exceed what the Texas families would get, or else it gives the other bidder the ability to cut their bid to basically nothing and in turn reduce the amount that the Connecticut families forgo and the amount the Texas families take home by however much they want.

This is all amateur analysis, but short of rejecting the Connecticut/Onion bid outright for some reason I don’t think there’s any way that this doesn’t put the families in a worse spot. Instead whoever is behind the FUAS bid (widely believed to be Jones’s allies) may get to decide how much to screw the families over.

Edit to fix some numbers. What’s $1,498.5 billion between friends?

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?

I mean, it sounds like they did ask how much it would cost, he just bulldozed through the question instead of seriously engaging with it and legacy media is too chickenshit to report it as “Trump apathetic about costs of deportation plan” or “Mass Deportation to Cost Billions Despite Trump’s Claims” because putting the things he says in context makes him sound like the madman he is and apparently truth is no longer sufficient defense from defamation.

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but this makes a lot of sense. Especially in a 2-party system the election is inevitably going to be a vibe check on the status quo as much as it is a specific election focusing on specific candidates and policies. I’d like to look more closely at the margins to get a feel for whether the Republicans could have run a ham sandwich and still been successful as opposed to the specific appeal of Trumpism.

Not that that changes how rough the next 4 years are going to get for a lot of people.

Yeah, though in his (incredibly lukewarm) defense he seemed more interested in the batshit crazy aliens-control-the-government theories than the more pedestrian conservative stuff, although the line between the two has greatly narrowed over the years.

I think the other important point to add is that evo psych in popular discourse is rarely used to explain alone. Instead it seems to always lead into the naturalistic fallacy as an explanation for why the world can’t or shouldn’t be kinder, more humane, or less authoritarian. Add on to this that the people making these arguments are usually pretty out of touch with the actual archaeological record about their supposed environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and it’s not at all surprising that whatever legitimate insights it may offer are buried under a mountain of bullshit.

Honestly I think a lot of the worst evo psych takes don’t even get as far as hypothesizing or evidence. They fail at the first hurdle of “identify something about the world”. It’s the classic Freudian error of never once asking “hey wait is everyone like this or is it just me?”

Horses were at least marginally less ridiculous before people got involved. Not quite to the same extent as dogs, but compare a steppe horse with a thoroughbred and you’ll see that they’re smaller and hardier. Much better equipped to live, slightly less able to carry fully armored people on their back.

How are you holding them accountable when one of them is still going to be in power? You’re just sacrificing one of the few concrete mechanisms you have to actually make things better. Yeah, a Harris victory doesn’t mean immediate victory in the fight against this atrocity, but a Trump election does mean defeat.

A police report would mark a diversion from the usual pattern of these things where Trump surrogates talk a big game about the massive conspiriacies against them (and therefore against You, the hypothetical American voter) to the media, but if they ever end up in front of a court or a police report or something where lying may have actual consequences they back off hard. How many times did we hear about all the mountains of evidence they had of voter fraud in 2020, and how many of the resulting court cases include those same lawyers specifically saying “we do not allege voter fraud” when the judge asks about it.

It’s not that beauty is skin-deep, it’s that the subdermal tissues and structures are the stuff of eldricht nightmares and cronenbergian horror.

Given the /aiml URL they’ve got there I suspect that this is actually a picture of one of their real graduates pitching yet another terrible AI service that burns half a rainforest to badly summarize diet advice or something.

It also fits in with the wider pattern of calling the opposition out for their weirdness and pettiness. A subtle “you all remember the tan suit thing, right?” as well as bait for another unforced error.

Would you believe that there’s a racist element to this as well?

Keeps me in a job, at least.