TGIF [DOT 13/12/24]

13/12/24 MegMegMcGee 23

Happy Friday the 13th or as I celebrate it, Happy Taylor Swift Day!

Word on the street in Maryland is that a lot of people recognized him when it happened and didn’t say anything.

Lawyer of suspect in healthcare exec killing explains client’s outburst at jail
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/12/unitedhealthcare-suspect-lawyer-explains-outburst

I know I said it before but I’m just so disgusted by this

Trump reportedly promises January 6 pardons ‘in the first hour’ of his presidency or sooner – US politics live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/dec/12/biden-clemency-trump-us-politics-updates

Stonks!

Macy’s employee who hid $151 million in delivery expenses was trying to mask initial mistake, sources say
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/11/macys-m-earnings-q3-2024.html

Sprots! [The Guardian has this under Sports…]

Gukesh Dommaraju becomes youngest world chess champion after horrific Ding Liren blunder
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/dec/12/gukesh-dommaraju-india-wins-world-chess-championship-youngest-champion-ding-liren

OK this sounds cool

A Route 66 town was dead. This man resurrected it into ‘a classic desert destination’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/11/american-ghost-towns-route-66-amboy-california

Have a super weekend!

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23 Comments

      • …I have some sympathy for the phrasing, I guess…you’re right, of course…it’s not only predictably awful shit the guy who got elected promising to do shit that’s pretty much just as awful would seem likely to do…it’s one he keeps saying he’s going to do

        …but when you think of all of the things that don’t stand to reason that need to all have lined up to pretend to be true for legal purposes to reach that point…it seems like too much of a reach to claim that’s believable?

        …nietzsche’s deal about how if you got rid of all the evil you’d need new terms because good & evil would be rendered meaningless is kinda the ballpark of where I end up…it’s “real” in the sense that it’s literally good enough for government work…but the whole thing is predicated on so many things that are demonstrably at odds with what I struggle not to think of as an underlying objective reality I sort of assume must exist at least at some level of abstraction that it’s also true that it isn’t in some ways that we’re used to thinking count for something[*]

        …a bunch of supposedly smart dudes in europe not super long ago did a whole thing where they tried to turn language into algebra to solve for whether or not a statement had a positive truth value…the present king of france being bald is a bit of a recurring theme…but with all the AI this & AI that of it all…there’s probably some stuff we could do with figuring out about how “believable” works & its relationship to reality…because it’s getting genuinely non-trivial to parse basic terminology & he hasn’t even got sworn in yet…& pretty much every device anyone gets for christmas is going to be putting an AI synopsis filter between everything so the phrase “chinese whispers” could wind up meaning some interesting things…so…could be we might need to develop some ways of differentiating between varieties of “true” that have meaningfully different characteristics

        …it’s probably just me, though

        [* – …sort of hard to argue that they actually do…increasingly so, even…but even so…that does maybe achieve the level of both delusion & functional necessity for the general operation of society…so most folks mostly do act like that stuff is true…enough that it also sort of is…it’s not impossible that it makes less sense the more you think about it & argably that’s why when people aren’t forced to think about it generally it all seems to tick over with less shit on fire]

  2. That Macy’s story has been making the rounds at my firm, and it’s just so batshit. First, that it went undiscovered for so long and second, that it’s such a vast amount. We deal with fraudulent employees from time to time with our clients, but it’s much more in the tens of thousands of dollar range, not hundreds of millions.

    And the takeaway here is that you WILL get caught, even if it takes years. Eventually things aren’t going to balance, or somebody’s going to notice a weirdly large sum on the general ledger. That’s actually one of our selling points — an outside accounting firm doesn’t have any incentive to cook the books, and even if we did, at least two people review everything.

    • I’ll add that mega drugstore chain Walgreens was getting huge press crying about shoplifting but more recently admitted they were conflating overall shrinkage with shoplifting, and that much of their shrinkage was due to failures in accounting and inventory management. Target also ended up walking back their hype.

      It’s incredibly easy for insiders to hide millions in losses for a very long time, and it’s often just written off when corporate accountants throw up their hands over what exactly happened.

      Shoplifters can take $100 at a time. An employee can make 1,000 times as much disappear from a keyboard. And it’s often not fraud, just incompetence.

      • …whilst this is true…it’s also true that in some places the amount of stock lost to outright theft has got to be a bit of a sick joke…the people who have to work in places where a dude will come in & physically smash open displays to dump the contents into a duffel & walk out know that’s different from having to keep an eye out for people slipping something into a bag or a pocket the way they used to

        …you might think that would incline those businesses to orient their policies around that not being the sort of environment their employees had to work in…but in at least some cases the thing was an iterative process of persistent theft & the management telling the staff not to put themselves in harm’s way over stock means they watch the same people steal pretty much the same stuff the same way over & over whenever they aren’t currently locked up for doing it…so…from a c-suite perspective…they are in fact putting their employees wellbeing first…which I’m sure is a great comfort to all concerned?

        • “some places” is doing a ton of work there.

          Shoplifting has always existed, always will. But the reporting on it has been Reefer Madness style moral panic stuff. There just has not been an epidemic.

          https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-15/organized-retail-theft-crime-rate

          https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html

          There’s been a weird phenomenon of liberals who have a Trump supporter-like belief that shoplifting is out of control in cities because it fits their narratives about the world at large. And no amount of evidence will shake their faith, because who needs data when there are random anecdotes? An immigrant killed a guy in California and a gang stole $4200 in baby formula in NYC, what else do you need to know?

          Like I said, there has always been shoplifting, and when you consider the seven trillion dollar size of the US brick and mortar retail market, there will even be the occasional big grab. It’s fantastically easy for reporters to find those anecdotes considering how many stores are out there – Walgreens alone has over 8,000 in the US.

          But’s a very small percentage of the market, and it hasn’t EXPLODED or any of the other headline words out there. And when it comes to retail losses, the big issue is with how much is actually due to management failures.

           

          • …beg to differ…”some places” is doing precisely zero lifting in what I said

            …no claims were made about rate of incidence or size of sample…you’re reading that in on your own

            …it has happened…that’s literally all I said…that that chain of events has played out on one or more occasions in shops…in more than one country, as it happens…& that from the perspective of the specific people in the small sample set of those who work in them it has all the hallmarks of a set of perverse incentives dictating an outcome that they consider to be a bigger problem than the response to it indicates to them the management does

            …that part I’m not sure even you would dispute

            …so…if you want to vent about something…go ahead…if you want to vent at someone…pick a different player…because you headed off base right off the bat, there…& there’s no percentage in it

  3. It looks like a lot of people were looking the other way on Mangione. Apparently at least one of his relatives was a local politician, and it’s pretty hard to believe family wouldn’t be able to ID him.

    If I had to guess, I’d suspect that immediate family was talking to lawyers rather than the cops about the best course of action. Which, hey, I’d probably do the same. It didn’t seem like he was an imminent danger to anyone else.

    • He comes from a prominent family and his cousin sits in the Maryland House of Delegates.

      I wonder if they will set up a GoFundMe for him. Not that he would need it, unless he’s been disowned. Though there are very different circumstances surrounding the murders committed in New York by these two men in their mid-20s, apparently Daniel Penny, of much humbler means, got a GoFundMe set up to pay for his legal bills, and almost immediately it went over $3 million. People couldn’t log on fast enough! I thought to myself, good luck getting an untainted jury in this subway-riding town.

      • A rich right wing family and he’s a major Trump organizer who backs Moms for Liberty.

        Maybe time to delete the people who were pushing the Pelosi conspiracy theory from your friends list?

        • …out of curiosity…which pelosi conspiracy theory?

          …not sure if the oversight committee thing qualifies but fwiw that does seem to be coming from a wider field than the post…& doesn’t seem particularly off-brand for pelosi

          …but…it’s not like there aren’t plenty of them…pelosi conspiracies, that is…so I was just wondering if you were thinking of a particular one?

          • He was theorizing that Mangioni’s family and Pelosi were in cahoots somehow because she was born in Baltimore before she moved out to San Francisco 60 something years ago.

            That family is evidently big time supporters of the rightwing archbishops in the area who have been major antiabortion, antigay  champions and enmeshed in a huge child abuse scandal for years.

            Those Cardinals were also part of the effort to drive liberal Catholics like Pelosi out of the church.

            But you know, all Italians are alike.

            • …cahoots is a tad vague…not complaining…but iirc his family literally own at least one country club…& it’s probably not unfair to accuse pelosi of seeming to fit in the country club set…&…those family interests of the guy who certainly seems to have done it also include a care facility…so…they aren’t even six degrees of seperation away from health insurance sins…gotta imagine the part where the dead guy was charged with insider trading stuff would be a gimme

              …it’s maybe different to say that there’s some parallels to be drawn that would suggest an alignment of interests…&…I dunno…she’s got her PR people briefing them on how to respond to the press…when there’s that much mud in the water…& then you throw in the part where there’s insider trading stuff to have a stir with

              …I’m a little surprised that isn’t the common conspiratorial denominator, to be honest?

              …like…it seems like it was a pension fund for, of all things, hollywood firefighters that accused him & a couple of others…one of which allegedly made several times as much on the stock-dumping deal before the news broke that a recent acquisition was under antitrust investigation…compared to the dead guy…not pelosi

              …I mean…it’s right there…but I guess you just can’t make fetch happen on demand…not that I’d be surprised to see that getting pushed by a bunch of chatbot sounding comments/posts/”articles” at this point?

            • No, not cahoots, but I bet Pelosi’s father and brother, both former mayors of Baltimore, knew the Mangiones socially. Nancy Pelosi’s father must be dead by now, and there’s a good chance her brother is. I wasn’t whipping up conspiracies. It was more like a “gosh, it really is a small world, isn’t it? I wonder if…”

      • …I don’t have it to hand but there was a clip I saw of some fox talking heads decrying how outrageous it was to lionize a man who had committed homicide…while the primary image they were overlayed on was of a stage at an event where a crowd of people were literally cheering the entrance of kyle rittenhouse

        …not only is cognitive dissonance a hell of a drug…but…whether he needs it or not I don’t think there’s any question that if you put together a go fund me you’d find people prepared to throw money at making the statement that they think “this guy shouldn’t go to prison”

        …your odds of breaking whatever goal you set seem to go up if you’re further along the white-supremicist-hate-addicted-toxic-male spectrum, though…so…presentable-looking white guy murders homeless guy on a subway…yeah…kyle pulled in half a million in three months & went back to that well at least a few times

        …according to some people luigi’s more photogenic than either of those…so…I expect those coffers would fill up pretty quick?

  4. Livia Pelosi strikes again! This is from the NY Post, so I’ll spare you the link:

    Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly launched a behind-the-scenes effort to thwart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.

    Pelosi (D-Calif.), 84, would rather see Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) serve as ranking member on the high-profile panel and is “actively working to tank” AOC’s bid, according to Punchbowl News.

    The former House speaker has been “making calls” urging Democrats to support Connolly, 74, over Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 35, the outlet reported Thursday.

    Oh, Nan, give it up. As JFK so wisely put it, it is time to pass the torch to a new generation. You would have been about 20 or 21 when Kennedy said this.

    I have said this before, many times. One of the things I would love to see is a President younger than I am. I came very close with Kamala. Same with Barry (Michelle is slightly younger than I am.) So aside from my internalized homophobia (but if you knew some of these characters you’d recoil in horror) I have to deal with ageism, which I’m using against myself!

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