No FAIR

Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.

A knowledgeable reader took a look at a court filing on the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire. The implication for Los Angeles rebuilding its burned out neighborhoods are not pretty. As you will see below, nearly 2/3 of the homes destroyed in the Santa Cruz Mountains conflagration are not being rebuilt. Fewer than 15% have been rebuilt and are now occupied.

We will need to firm this tidbit as more authoritative sources weigh in, but this informed-looking comment on Reddit suggests that most claims will not be paid out in full due to the State of California being the insurer and lacking the capacity to do so. From Reddit:

The issue isn’t insurance companies going bankrupt in California since, as you mentioned, there are virtually no homeowners insurance plans with wildfire coverage that are underwritten by anything other than the California FAIR Plan anymore. The California FAIR Plan is both the underwriter for virtually all of California’s wildfire insurance as well as the guarantee association that is owned/run by the state.

The issue is that the price controls combined with the state pillaging the FAIR Plan’s funds for “other stuff” means that it only has $400 million to cover the losses. This is combined with the fact that California has a potentially >$60 billion budget deficit for 2025 that they don’t know how they’ll fund (the actual deficit isn’t actually known because the state is deliberately excluding certain items from its calculation of it, such as $20 billion that it needs to pay to the Federal Government this year. The deficit is not less than $38 billion with a middle estimate of ~$60 billion. The high estimate is “who knows?”).

The California Department of Insurance’s official plan on how to now “fund” the FAIR Plan’s multibillion dollar exposure is to prevent insurance companies from non-renewing existing plans as of January 9 and to threaten unspecified penalties for insurance companies that don’t retroactively renew policies that were non-renewed in the past few months. That wouldn’t necessarily do much even if it was able to be implemented, never mind that its unconstitutional and has a 0% chance of going through.

Because there’s very few policies written by insurance companies, their exposure is so low that there isn’t really a concern about any of them becoming insolvent. The real issue is that the FAIR Plan is very clearly insolvent, there is no viable mechanism to fund it, and the FAIR Plan itself is supposed to be the entity covering claims against insolvent insurers.

This isn’t a situation that has ever happened in the modern US and no one knows how it’s going to play out.

So everything is like CalPERS.

On top of the elephant-in-the-room “how meager will my insurance payout be?” another big impediment to reconstruction is shortages and inflation. If that’s in play from a major burn more than four years ago, imagine what will happen with the much greater pressure on building supplies with the unheard of scale of Los Angeles reconstruction when that gets going. (...)

The press is already starting to discuss hurdles homeowners whose houses were burnt out face, from insurance payouts being (legitimately) slow due to claims processing being overwhelmed to insurers trying to lowball payouts and policy-holders (and likely regulators and politicians) going to war with insurers, compounded by high odds of widespread underinsurance. High insurance costs would translate into conscious or accidental only-partial coverage.

Readers who are LA-knowledgeable mentioned other impediments to rebuilding. The wealthy Palisades is a family neighborhood. “There’s nothing to go back to: no schools, no grocery stores.” The implication is that families will be strongly inclined to move to functioning communities and may stay there due to not wanting to uproot their kids yet again.

By contrast, in Altadena, which is more middle class, many of the residents are multi-generational. They could not have afforded to buy the homes they lived in and cannot afford to rebuild. Nearly all will be underinsured, particularly in light of the way building costs will be sure to rise as a result of competition for materials and contractors.

Another potential stumbling point is pressure to rezone. For instance, there will be pressure to allow more multi-family housing, the arguments including climate change benefits (lower materials use, cheaper cooling and heating) and arguably faster restoration of housing for if nothing else, the benefit of businesses.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/NYT; Santa Cruz Planning Dept.; YouTube

[ed. It does make you think. Pretty soon it'll be impossible to get disaster insurance of any kind (if it isn't already), so no one is safe even if you're living in the middle of a city. Apparently these 'urban fires' are caused by flaming debris carried at great distances - a sort of chain reaction - not the edge of wilderness type situations one would expect. Another wrinkle (and I'm just speculating here) but usually no insurance company is entirely on the hook. Typically they'll 'reinsure' policies with other insurers (or governments) to spread the risk around - eg. FAIR. That sounds an awful lot like the sub-prime mortgage fiasco we saw where various high-risk loans were 'bundled' and sold off in 'tranches' to banks and investors. Will this be a similar situation, with contagion spreading beyond the insurance industry to other industries as well? We'll see (but, minimum, rates are poised to go skyrocketing - for everybody).  As with the financial crisis, the federal government likely will step in at some point to make sure insurance companies who couldn't get reinsurance don't go bankrupt (but with the bozos coming in, who knows). As for homeowners, well...good luck.]

 

Los Angeles Is Being Crushed Under the Weight of Inaction

We got the evacuation alert on Wednesday night. The fire came out of nowhere and threatened to sweep through Hollywood. I pulled our son out of the bathtub. We rushed into the car and drove north, past two other fires, through smoke and sirens, gridlock and chaos, flames on the horizon in all directions.

People keep saying the scenes out of Los Angeles look like something from a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need a protagonist. Every on-screen apocalypse has a leader. So where is ours?

Fires have wiped out entire communities. Thousands have lost their homes. Many more are displaced and looters are taking the personal property of those lucky enough to have any. The steady stream of alerts from Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app, ding as I type this, new fires igniting, existing ones spreading, winds picking up again. Will the latest alert say that our neighborhood, our street or our school is next?

I would love a deus ex machina to change this story line or for the real-estate developer and would-be mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his mall, the Grove. For now, I’d settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it’s going to be horrific, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.

As any screenwriter will tell you, a protagonist does not need to be perfect. We actually prefer that they be flawed, as long as they are ours.

I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at ground zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?

In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin called General Honoré “a John Wayne dude” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”

In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.

It’s not that Los Angeles lacks heroism. The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From firefighters and paramedics to everyone who has offered shelter, volunteered and pitched in on GoFundMe pages, I’ve never seen such unity. But if leadership is that Churchillian combination of confident words and decisive action, Los Angeles has seen neither.

When Mayor Karen Bass returned from a previously scheduled trip to Ghana, she held a brief, defensive news conference and told residents they could find emergency resources at “URL.” She had to quiet a public squabble with her fire chief, telling reporters at a joint news conference on Saturday that she and Chief Kristin M. Crowley are in “lock step.”

On Saturday, she said on X, “We will get through this crisis, together.” On Sunday, during a news conference, Ms. Bass vowed to “make sure that Los Angeles comes out of this a much better city.”

Will these efforts put Angelenos at ease? On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.

In a viral video, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, in aviator sunglasses, looked to me as if he couldn’t wait to get back in his idling S.U.V. as an anguished Angeleno told him her community had been destroyed and implored him for help. He did make time to do a lengthy interview with “Pod Save America,” in which he defended his record and response to the crisis, explaining that he “wasn’t getting straight answers” from local officials. How about we Pod Save Los Angeles first?

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming Democratic policies for the devastation in Los Angeles.

Despite what X will have us think, history shows Americans are pretty forgiving in a crisis. We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose. Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows? (...)

Every day we watch our city, our communities, our livelihoods burn. At least 24 people have died and an estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed. Without leadership, we try to find reliable information on WhatsApp chats and neighborhood Facebook pages. (I told you, it’s bleak.)

At the moment I do not care who did or did not cut funding for which water or fire services or whether the smelt is a thing or if the wind ate your homework. We are heartbroken, suffocating in toxic air and crushed under the weight of inaction.

by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jacob Ogden

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured in Bureaucrats

[ed. The stupidity is breathtaking. I can only assume this was some kind of trolling scare tactic to demonstrate bona fides with the new administration. Want permits to take twice as long, with half the people to review them (check); want to create a new level of homelessness as tens of thousands of people are thrown out of work and lose their healthcare (check); want to get sued forever, or at least long enough to get through one administration (check); want to sever all institutional knowledge of technical issues (check); want the same work to be outsourced to private contractors at twice the price (check); want to degrade the environment, food and drug safety, financial industry safeguards, etc. (check, check, and check). And more.

I suspect the real reason this is a thing is that grifters like Trump and Musk and the Swamy just want enough short-term approvals (from their embedded political operatives) to clear enough regulatory hurdles to blast their future economic prospects to the moon (and beyond). It's not that faceless bureaucrats are to blame, it's that politicians pass laws that the administrative state are then obligated to put into regulations. If you want to go after government waste and inefficiency go after misguided laws and unecessary regulations, not the people that are burdened with writing, enforcing and defending them. Note: the size of the federal government workforce has barely budged over the last 20 years since 2000 (CRS), and is less than 4 percent of the total budget, excluding military personnel:]

Compensation (wages and benefits) for the 3.8 million federal defense and nondefense workers accounts for 8 percent of spending. Defense workers (uniformed and civilian) account for 56 percent of compensation and nondefense for 44 percent. (Cato Institute)

See also: Bureaucracy Isn't Measured in Bureaucrats (ACX)

Image: X

Lobi People, Burkina Faso, Shepherd and his herd of black iron chameleons.

via:

Michelle ma belle

[ed. Me too.]

Q&A: Kevin Kisner on the Ryder Cup, NBC and What He Wants From PGA Tour Stars

The PGA Tour’s resident trash-talker — the de-facto leader of the “tell it like it is” movement in pro golf — has a big year ahead of him. Kevin Kisner is not only set to be the lead NBC golf analyst this tour season, but on Wednesday he was announced as one of U.S. captain Keegan Bradley’s assistants for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.

Since he first earned his tour card in 2011, Kisner’s fiery game has been just as much of a fixture as his unfiltered charm. Now, the four-time PGA Tour winner has one more shot at continuing his playing career at 40 years old, while simultaneously diving more fully into the broadcast media realm. In 2025, Kisner, known as “Kiz” to everyone on the PGA Tour, will make use of the tour’s career money exemption for the top 50 all-time earners on tour. He’s exactly No. 50 on that list.

That schedule will allow the player-turned-analyst to be in the booth for some of the biggest tournaments of the year, including but not limited to: U.S. Open, Open Championship, Players Championship and FedEx Cup playoffs. He, however, won’t be a part of NBC’s broadcast of the Ryder Cup, choosing the team room over the booth. NBC supported that decision, Kisner said.

Kisner first spoke to The Athletic in December about this pivotal moment in his career, then agreed to answer two more questions on Wednesday about the Ryder Cup decision. Those answers begin this Q&A, followed by his thoughts on his playing career, the role broadcast partners have in golf and more. (...)

You’re going to be one of NBC’s lead golf analysts this year. When did you get that call?

As soon as we got done with the playoffs last year, (NBC golf head) Sam Flood and I talked a couple of times. He said he wanted to come to Aiken and see me with Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, and Tommy Roy the producer. We worked out a date and they came and spent three or four hours with my wife Brittany and I. We chatted about life and they basically asked if I had any interest in taking a job full-time. We discussed it for a while, and I told them I still wanted to play on my top-50 career money (exemption), but I loved the opportunity. I liked the team. I was grateful for it. And if they’re willing to work with me through 2025 — that if I wasn’t good on the golf course, I’d give them my all in 2026. And if I was good on the course, then they’d have to find somebody else in 2026. (...)

In 2025, what do you think the role of the color commentator is? Has it shifted over time?

Well, I think the role of TV and tour players is a partnership. I think that hasn’t been adequately displayed over the course of the last 30 years on the PGA Tour. The player’s biggest partner in money is their media obligations and their media rights — their persona or “aura.” I don’t know if that’s the right word, I’ve just been on a four-day hunting trip. Whatever you want to call it, the players should not be thinking that the media is out to get them anymore, especially the TV media guys. Because if you don’t have them, the next media deal is not going to be big. So that’s what I always talk to the guys about. I’m like, man, I will never do anything to disrespect you or to hurt your career or hurt your brand. But you have to give us some more access, and I think that’s going to be my kind of M.O. in this role. Try to bring the two together more often. (...)

What is something that you had no idea about broadcasting that you learned for the first time last year?

Just the flow of it. How little prep they gave me for going on. I thought I’d have to go to school or something. Obviously, I’m not a broadcaster. A 20-minute phone call led them to give me a mic on a national program, which is kind of scary. Tommy Roy gave me a 20-minute rundown of how it works and do’s and don’ts. Then I flew to Maui, and I sat in the truck the first day of The Sentry and watched. Then I went into the booth and watched for a couple of hours. The next day they were handing me a microphone.

What have you learned about golf since starting to commentate pro golf?

The best players every week are doing the same stuff. It’s just about who doesn’t make mistakes, and who makes the putts. If you watch from our point of view, they all hit it in the general area of the green on every hole. At the end of the day, I know exactly what a certain putt does because I’ve watched it 15 times from all these good players hitting the same spot. The really good players hit it in the same spot on the greens. When you’re playing really well, it’s like robotic golf.

Scottie (Scheffler), he had an incredible year. What did he make? $70 million? I got to spend a lot of time with him at the Presidents Cup. Him and Russell Henley were my guys. We had a ball together all week. I just love the way Scottie can focus. He can focus as well as any player I’ve ever seen, like Tiger. Tiger wore it all the time, but Scottie smiles more than Tiger used to. They have the same laser focus when it’s time to hit a golf shot.

As a player, what do you want from the guy talking about you in the booth? Do you emulate that when you’re up there?

I want my 12 handicap buddies sitting at home to say, “Yes, he’s right” or “I’m going to try that.” And I also want Scottie Scheffler to say, yeah, I did pull the heck out of that putt. Kiz is right. So if I can get both sides of the equation to understand and know that I’m right, then I’m doing my job.

by Gabby Herzig, The Athletic |  Read more:
Image: uncredited via:

Dispatch: Benghazi. Beautiful Beaches and Nothing Else

[ed. Too funny. Who doesn't love a cliffhanger?]
via:

Tubi Hits 97M Monthly Users And 10B Annual Streaming Hours

Tubi continued to gain traction in 2024, surpassing 97 million monthly active users and 10 billion streaming hours.

Fox Corp. paid $440 million in 2020 to acquire the free, ad-supported streaming outlet and has recently projected it will bring in $1 billion in full-year revenue, up from $150 million at the time of the acquisition. The outlet has become a welcome bright spot for the company, whose linear network assets are under ongoing pressure from pay-TV cord-cutting.

The MAU metric is not a universally agreed-upon one and is a holdover from the self-reporting early days of the internet. A Fox rep did not respond to Deadline’s request for clarification of how the company calculates an MAU. For some streaming businesses, the threshold is considered to be reached if an individual viewer spends just 15 seconds watching their service. Even if the bar is higher than that, Tubi’s 97 million MAU figure includes duplication across devices and within households.

Regardless of how users are quantified, viewership is undeniably increasing. Tubi has continued to climb Nielsen’s monthly Gauge chart of total viewing via TV sets, outpacing Max, Peacock and Paramount+ and running neck and neck with the Roku Channel as the No. 2 free outlet after YouTube. (...)

The company’s report on 2024 also included some notable audience statistics. More than 34% of Tubi viewers are between the ages of 18-34, the company said, while more than half are Gen Z or Millennials and nearly half are multicultural. Fully 77% of viewers say they do not have cable, Tubi said, citing the November MRI Cord Evolution Study.

Unlike some streaming outlets like Paramount’s rival, Pluto TV, Tubi reports that 95% of its viewing is on demand rather than live.

Built a decade ago from library film and TV titles, Tubi has expanded its offering of originals, which are now watched by one in four viewers, according to the company. Young adult romance Sidelined: The QB and Me drew more viewers of any title in Tubi’s history in its first week last November and delivered the most new viewers for any Tubi title ever. In addition to the originals push, the streamer has also forged content partnerships with independent distributors and launched Stubios, a fan-driven studio aiming to harness the pot.

by Dade Hayes, Deadline |  Read more:

Image: Tubi

[ed. YouTube TV was ok until they raised their price by $10 (for no good reason) to$83/mo. with ads. I'm done. That's why I quit cable in the first place. See also: Just how many ads are there on ad-supported streaming apps, really? (Sherwood): (hint: up to 18 ads per 50 min. show)]

Also: Why is sports streaming so convoluted? (Simon Owens):

"Of course, even if a sports fan subscribes to Venu, it’s still likely they’ll need to subscribe to at least one or two other streaming services — Netflix, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and/or Apple TV+ — if they want to watch all the games hosted by a single pro league.

I'm not a consumer of sports content, but if I were I feel like I'd be extremely frustrated by how much the broadcast rights are sliced and diced across so many paid subscription platforms. Imagine if you had to subscribe to four streaming services just to watch all the seasons of a single TV show. (...)

If I were a sports fan, I'd wonder why a single league couldn't just sell one subscription fee through its streaming app so I could access the entire library of games — or at the very least why a league doesn't sell its entire package to a single streamer. The current ecosystem just seems so anti-consumer to me."

‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’

Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era. I find myself returning to a famous translation of a line from Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.

To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.

Let’s begin with American politics. Trump is eight days from taking the oath of office for the second time, and America’s institutional storm walls are not, in 2025, what they were in 2017.

The Republican Party is meek, and Trump knows it. He would not have dared to send Senate Republicans names like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth for cabinet posts in his first term. Even beyond the party, he faces no mass resistance this time, nothing like the Women’s March that overwhelmed Washington in 2017. Democrats are dispirited and exhausted.

Trump is now flanked by an alliance of oligarchs led by Elon Musk. The billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times killed presidential endorsements of Kamala Harris, ABC News (owned by Disney) gave Trump’s “future presidential foundation and museum” $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump brought, Mark Zuckerberg is refocusing Meta platforms around “free expression” and his company against D.E.I., and Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for Melania Trump’s documentary about herself. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and a slew of other chief executives have recently traveled to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump. This differs from 2017, when Trump was treated as an aberration to be endured or a malignancy to reject. The billionaires see that the rules have changed. They are signaling their willingness to abide by them. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social after having dinner with Jeff Bezos. He isn’t wrong.

Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it. We have seen this termitic corruption consume democracies elsewhere, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which Trump and his allies cite as a model. Money and media make peace with the regime because to do otherwise is too costly. Once proud political parties become vehicles for the individual ambition they were designed to replace. I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.

As I was writing those paragraphs, I asked ChatGPT three or four questions. They were small queries of the sort I might once have asked Google. I have covered A.I. for years. I have never doubted its eventual possibilities. But year after year, I found no place for it in my daily routine. It was like an intern who demanded oversight when what I needed was insight. Over the past six months, though, the improvements in the models tipped that balance for me. A.I. has braided into my day in much the way that search engines did before it.

Behind the mundane gains in usefulness are startling gains in capacity. OpenAI debuted a quick succession of confusingly named models — GPT4 was followed by GPT-4o, and then the chain-of-thought reasoning model o1, and then, oddly, came o3 — that have posted blistering improvements on a range of tests.

The A.R.C.-A.G.I. test, for instance, was designed to compare the fluid intelligence of humans and A.I. systems, and proved hard for A.I. systems to mimic. By the middle of 2024, the highest score any A.I. model had posted was 5 percent. By the end of the year, the most powerful form of o3 scored 88 percent. It is solving mathematics problems that leading mathematicians thought would take years for an A.I. system to crack. It is better at writing computer code than all but the most celebrated human coders.

The rate of improvement is startling. “What we’re witnessing isn’t just about benchmark scores or cost curves — it’s about a fundamental shift in how quickly A.I. capabilities advance,” Azeem Azhar writes in Exponential View, a newsletter focused on technology. Inside the A.I. labs, engineers believe they are getting closer to the grail of general intelligence, perhaps even superintelligence.

There is much to be excited about in these advances. The purpose of A.I. is not to help me remember the proper proportions for overnight oats, it’s to make new discoveries in math and medicine and science; it’s the driverless taxis that now hum along the streets of some major cities; it’s the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.

But are we prepared for these intelligences that we are so intently summoning into our lives and beginning to entrust with our infrastructure and data and decision-making and war-making? Are we even really preparing for them?

Long before ChatGPT burst into view, I’d been following the work — and the fears — of the A.I. safety community: a tight-knit group of researchers and writers who believed that the pace of A.I. improvement was accelerating and the power of these systems would quickly grow beyond what we could control or even fully understand. For a brief period after ChatGPT was released in 2022, their fears were taken seriously, debated across the media and in Congress. Now that the introductory shock of these A.I. systems has worn off, so too has interest in their warnings. But it is hard for me to shake the feeling that they have been largely right about the shape of what has come so far — not just about how fast the technology has changed, but also about how poor our ability to understand it remains, and how unnerving its early behavior is.

The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”

Even if you believe we can get A.I. regulation right — and I’ve seen little that makes me optimistic — will we even know what the universe of models we need to regulate is if powerful systems can be built this cheaply and stored on personal computers? A Chinese A.I. firm recently released DeepSeek-V3, a model that appears to perform about as well as OpenAI’s 4o on some measures but was trained for under $6 million and is lightweight enough to be run locally on a computer.

That DeepSeek is made by a Chinese firm reveals another pressure to race forward with these systems: China’s A.I. capabilities are real, and the contest for geopolitical superiority will supersede calls for caution or prudence. A.I. is breaking through at the same moment the international system is breaking down. The United States and China have drifted from uneasy cooperation to grim competition, and both intend to be prepared for war. Attaining A.I. superiority has emerged as central to both sides of the conflict. (...)

We may not understand much that these A.I. models do, but we know what they need: chips and training data and energy. The first wave of A.I., Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic and a former policy director at OpenAI, writes, was about algorithmic dominance: “Did you have the ability to have enough smart people to help you train neural nets in clever ways?” Then came the need for computing dominance: “Did you have enough computers to do large-scale projects?” But the future, he says, will turn on power dominance: “Do you have access to enough electricity to power the data centers?”

A report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that U.S. data centers went from 1.9 percent of total electrical consumption in 2018 to 4.4 percent in 2023 and will consume 6.7 percent to 12 percent in 2028. Microsoft alone intends to spend $80 billion on A.I. data centers this year. This elephantine increase in the energy that will be needed not just by the United States but by every country seeking to deploy serious A.I. capabilities comes as the world is slipping further behind its climate goals and warming seems to be outpacing even our models.

Every month from June 2023 to September 2024 broke climate records. “It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected,” Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather wrote in November. We are seeing, in the wildfires turning swaths of Los Angeles to ash, the precise kinds of extreme weather events that we’ve been warned about — and we are also seeing how unprepared we are to deal with them. 

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Anthony Gerace. Photograph by Getty Images

[ed. Yeah, but who's gonna make it through the playoffs this year?]

Hall & Oates

[ed. Full album.]

A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan Is Having a Hollywood Moment. His No. 1 Hater Is Ready.

At a recent showing of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of young women settled in to watch the delicately handsome Timothée Chalamet impersonate the singer.

They barely noticed the 80-year-old man sitting next to them, armored in a winter coat and hat that he never removed. Then, the film began.

“This is all made up,” the man brayed at the screen.

“It’s not what you think it is.”

“You’re scum!”

And so A.J. Weberman’s full-throated annotation of the film continued for 2 hours and 20 minutes, replete with dark interpretations of lyrics and references to how Dylan and the film intersected with such things as communism, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the C.I.A. and Barry Goldwater.

The group of women exchanged confused glances, but said nothing.

For more than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — though it is Weberman who has done most of the intertwining.

He began as one of Dylan’s keenest observers and fans, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted through trash cans outside 94 MacDougal Street, where the singer once lived. But he became Dylan’s nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on madness.

Now that Dylan is getting a Hollywood moment, Weberman sees a renewed opportunity to advance the anti-Dylan agenda that has sustained him for decades. He is writing a new book interpreting Dylan’s lyrics, and answering a cascade of emails and calls asking for his take on the film.

Though his garbage-sifting has waned, his vendetta is as strong as ever.

Weberman, who has supported himself since his teens by selling weed, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Riverdale. He briefly attended Michigan State University before being kicked out after a pot arrest, and then settled in the East Village and eventually fell in with countercultural Yippie figures like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

It was the 1960s, and he helped organize smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on establishment figures. Dylan provided much of the soundtrack.

“I said, ‘Wow, this guy’s a real revolutionary,’” he said. “I was into the civil rights movement. I fell for it.”

He fell hard. Weberman began laboriously compiling all of Dylan’s lyrics to study.

While listening to Dylan songs on acid, Weberman became convinced that Dylan’s cryptic lyrics masked dark meanings. He heard references to himself. He played Dylan’s records backward and claimed to hear certain messages, like “Don’t expose me” concealed in the obscure song “Time Passes Slowly.”

Pop stars have long been figures of obsession, dating back at least to the Beatles. The affable Liverpudlians inspired morbid theories among fans as their hair grew longer and their songs stranger. Some people played their records backward for secret messages and scoured album covers for clues that Paul McCartney was dead. Charles Manson, the cult-leader killer, took inspiration from their words, which he thought predicted a race war. A deranged fan killed John Lennon.

As a shape-shifting rock poet — a prophet with a nasal yowl — Dylan and his opaque words were particularly attractive for theorists of the literary, musical and conspiratorial varieties.

Richard F. Thomas, who teaches a class on Dylan at Harvard University, said Weberman’s belief that certain lyrics refer to him are “pretty much fantasy and beyond self-obsession.”

“It’s hard to know how serious or grounded he is at times,” the professor said of Weberman, adding, “To be fair, he was always after what makes the songs tick — not that he was going to find the answers in the trash.”

Weberman said his growing perception that Dylan was abandoning his leftist political messages had fueled his drive to shame the artist into “getting a conscience back.”

He took issue with albums like Dylan’s 1969 country offering “Nashville Skyline.” The record’s cover showed the smiling singer benignly tipping his hat, and its songs lacked overt political and social commentary.

He began claiming publicly that Dylan had become strung out on drugs — which Dylan denied — and had “sold out the left” by abandoning the political music that had defined his rise. He helped found the Dylan Liberation Front to re-radicalize Dylan and “free Bob Dylan from himself.”

Weberman said he finally met Dylan around 1971 when he knocked on his door.

“He said, ‘You’re not going to get into my life,’ and he slammed the door, so I figured I’d look through his garbage.”

Amid dirty diapers and kitchen scraps, he found personal letters and family photographs from the household, where Dylan lived with his wife, Sara, and their young children.

“I said, ‘This isn’t a garbage can, this a gold mine,’” he said.

Weberman began stalking the singer, pestering him on the phone and in person and writing about him in the East Village Other, an underground paper where he published images of finds from Dylan’s trash. He even asked readers if anyone could obtain a sample of Dylan’s urine. He wanted to test it for drugs.

Aron Kay, a Yippie buddy known for throwing pies in the faces of establishment figures, said Weberman, more than academic scholars, developed a visceral understanding of the songwriter and was determined to coax Dylan back to taking political stands about issues like the Vietnam War.

“A.J. always said, ‘You are what you throw away,’ and with Dylan, he went to the root of the matter: his garbage,” said Kay. “Even if Bob may not acknowledge it, it was a psychic cultural bonding between them. There was like a love-hate thing.”

Or perhaps Dylan wanted no involvement at all. He eventually stopped putting out items of interest, and asked Weberman to leave him and his trash alone. (...)

Today, celebrities rarely handle obsessive fans themselves; the task often falls to law enforcement. A man who stalked Ariana Grande pleaded guilty to various crimes, including burglary, after breaking into her home more than 90 times. Last year, a 33-year-old man was arrested twice in three days outside the TriBeCa home of Taylor Swift, another singer whose words are regularly the subject of speculation and dissection.

But Weberman’s behavior occurred in an era when the police were anathema to the counterculture, and mystic obsession was more plausible than it is today. For his part, Weberman says he was not nuts. He said he had regular conversations with Dylan by phone and at his Houston Street music studio before Dylan finally got fed up with him.

“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman said. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I was interested in his poetry. It was political, not about his celebrity.”

A spokesman for Dylan declined to comment.

Weberman made his mania into a program, and expanded it. He taught a Dylanology class at the Alternate U., a countercultural center in the Village. He brought groups of students, and later other Dylan followers, to the MacDougal building. He expanded his explorations into the jetsam of other famous people, including former President Richard M. Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“I moved on to other garbage cans,” he said.

by Corey Kilgannon, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times

Walter Becker & Steely Dan (Live)

[ed. Never got to hear enough of Walter who had a pretty cool, understated style. This is a song from his 11 Tracks of Whack solo album (being playing here live with SD). See also: Down in the Bottom.]

Steatite whale effigy, Chumash people, southern California coast, circa 1200-1600; Ai Weiwei, Surveillance Camera, 2010
via: here/here

Boz Scaggs

 

[ed. ..mmm.]

Disney Paid Off Trump for a Reason

Ronald Reagan believed in relaxing antitrust, and appointed Bill Baxter, “a severe-looking man in his early fifties, with coal-black slicked-down hair, cold, dark eyes, sunken cheeks, and a sallow complexion,” as author Steve Coll described him, to do so. But merger booms tend to start in specific sectors, in that era it was energy, specifically oil and commodities. The reason was that it was cheaper to buy oil reserves on Wall Street than to drill for it in Texas.

Today, there’s a similar pent-up demand for deal-making, but this time, it’s starting in entertainment, which is one of the first sectors we’re seeing consolidate after a change in administration. Unlike tech, entertainment is a ‘legacy’ industry whose business model no longer works, so the executives are trying to consolidate and squeeze whatever they can out of what’s left. And the first domino just fell, with a rather lawless sale of a majority of the relatively small sports streamer Fubo to Disney, where it will become part of a new sports-specific joint venture of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros.

I wrote about that joint venture when it was announced last February. At the time, it didn’t include Fubo, but was simply about combining Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. sports assets into a streaming service that could create more bargaining power for the incumbents. Instead of bidding against each other for sports programming, they could now collaborate. As the Economist put it, “If Disney, WBD and Fox bid jointly, they could rein in the price inflation that leagues now demand.”

Sports is by far the most important part of the pay TV industry. I mean, 97 out of the top 100 events on TV last year were sporting events. There’s sports, and then there’s everything else. Everything else is dying, moving to YouTube and Netflix, but sports is the one asset the incumbents still have that big tech mostly doesn’t. Fox, Warner Bros, and Disney all have massive content empires, and they are sustaining a lot of their non-sports content by packaging it with sports. As Disney CEO Bob Iger said, “You cannot launch a new multichannel platform or bundle successfully without ESPN.”

This new joint venture was blatantly illegal. It’s designed to reduce the bargaining power of sports leagues, who would have fewer bidders for their content. But the deal also created risk for anyone trying to form a sports programming network, like Fubo, since competitors would have to license content from direct rivals. When the joint venture was first announced, Fubo sued almost immediately, recognizing it would be quickly driven out of business if the network operators it licensed from combined their sports programming into a direct competitor.

Fubo’s logic was compelling. In August, Judge Margaret Garnett quickly ruled against the Disney/Fox/Warner Bros joint venture, writing that if it went through it would “exercise near-monopolistic control over the ability for a different live-sports-only streaming service to exist and compete.” It would control 54% of all U.S. sports rights, 75% of the “Big Five” sports (the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and college football), and 80% of the games for professional baseball, hockey, football, and basketball, including 98% of all playoff games for those leagues.

And it’s not like anyone can go out and license sports content from the leagues. As the judge put it, “The practical reality of these steep prices is that only the largest television programmers, and, increasingly, well-capitalized technology corporations (such as Amazon or Apple), can negotiate telecast licensing deals directly with the leagues.” (...)

So why would Gander and Disney CEO Bob Iger make such an obviously illegal move? The answer is that they think laws are now more guidelines. Donald Trump is President, and that means they will be able to consolidate. This deal reminds me of a scene in the movie Lord of War about a moment after the Soviet Union fell, where the main character, an arms dealer named Yuri Orlov, is trying to get a former Soviet General to order more guns he can steal. The general asks how to get the gun producers to comply. “We’ll cut them in,” says Orlov. Just make the bribe bigger, in other words, because no one’s really looking.

And that’s what’s happening here, an assumption that the new Antitrust Division cops will just look the other way. (...)

And the linchpin for TV is sports. So that’s where the first shots are being fired in this deal spree. But it won’t stop there. As with Reagan in the early 1980s, it wasn’t just the energy sector where we saw significant changes. And right now, there’s an assumption on Wall Street that pent-up dealmaking can now move forward, even when the deals are outlandish. In a similar deal this week, Getty Images is buying Shutterstock in an obvious move to monopolize the stock and editorial image licensing market and further demonetize photographers. The specter of AI image generation allows these two firms to pretend that their merge to a monopoly is necessary, as they are ‘legacy’ businesses who must combine to survive. And Paychex has cut a deal to buy Paycor while surprisingly cutthroat uniform supplier Cintas is trying to buy arch-rival UniFirst. Wall Street imagines there will be massive merger spree in all such ‘legacy’ areas.

Of course, we shouldn’t assume that these deals will just go through. The Trump administration doesn’t have to accept this kind of consolidation, they didn’t put in libertarians to serve as antitrust enforcers. And one would think that companies like Disney, which have been hated by the conservative movement for years, wouldn’t be the ones getting big favors. But then, the broader question is whether symbolic gestures, like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg groveling, are all it takes for Trump to let monopolists continue to run our society.  ~ Why a Corporate Deal You Haven't Heard of Should Scare You (BIG)

UPDATE: (Jan. 9, 2025)

On Tuesday, I wrote up a flagrantly illegal merger between Disney and sports streaming service Fubo. Fubo focuses on streaming sports, and licenses content from, among others, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros, who control large chunks of sports programming. So last year, when Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros formed a joint venture to create their own sports streaming service, Fubo objected on the grounds that such a project was an illegal merger. And they won a preliminary injunction, and were likely going to win at trial and on appeal.

Only, Fubo’s stock isn’t doing well. So earlier this week, Fubo CEO David Gandler sold a controlling stake in his company to Disney. Clever, right? He gets to profit from winning an antitrust suit, and instead of being David against Goliath, join Team Goliath. Fubo will have Disney’s resources, but its leaders imagine it will operate still sort of independently. Beyond that, Disney greased the wheels of the incoming administration, with a $16 million payment for defamation against Trump that all legal analysts agree is ridiculous if you’re just considering the law. Disney bought credibility with Trump, so why would his antitrust enforcers throw sand in the wheels of this deal?

There’s no problem, they might imagine, Fubo and Disney will both improve their products, everyone’s happy except for a few whiny lawyers and advocates. Fubo’s top leaders have that kind of malevolent naivety so common to corporate leaders in which they airbrush out of their minds their own violation of the law. But the more important question is, what could go wrong?

The answer is probably something Gandler and his team aren’t thinking about, whcih is merger risk. What happens for the 18-24 months during which the deal has to clear financing and regulatory hurdles?

Mergers, you see, are quite risky. They can fall apart for all sorts of reasons, but in the time your company is under contract to be sold, you can’t make any major strategic decisions or investments. You can barely hire or fire. You can’t really sign significant contracts, because no counterparty will see your guarantee as meaningful. You’re in limbo. Your purchaser, however, is not. They can do whatever they want. Meanwhile, you are stuck with massive legal bills; Kroger and Albertsons spent about a billion dollars on their failed merger in legal and administrative costs.

So if the deal falls apart, you’ve wasted 18-24 months, while the rival who bought you has invested, signed deals, launched products, et al during that time. In fact, your buyer might get cold feet, and try to sabotage the deal, but you can’t do anything about it. That’s the reason Albertsons is suing Kroger, alleging that Kroger didn’t really try to win the merger case because it secretly decided that the deal wasn’t worth it shortly after signing it.

In other words, the incentive for Iger to complete the deal and Gandler to complete it are wildly different. Disney will still be Disney, whereas Fubo will be a limping and probably dead company. Gandler had immense leverage, and that’s now gone with this deal. Failed merger deals lead to bad outcomes. After its merger failure, Illumina’s CEO got fired. So did Penguin’s CEO. Capri’s executive leadership is being shaken up after that deal failed. I’d be surprised if Albertsons’ leadership is kept around.

Still, so what? It’s not like this deal is going to fall apart. That’s the point of Disney’s dealings with Trump, to ensure that government enforcers don’t act in the face of consolidation in entertainment.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: Screenshot CNBC

[ed. I initially posted about this merger a few days ago, but then deleted it thinking there probably wasn't much interest. I've since reconsidered (see: Disney Makes Antitrust Problem Go Away by Buying Majority Stake in Fubo - below). After reading Matt's posts I now have a better idea of what's at stake, most strikingly: major corporations aren't waiting till Jan. 20 and the new administration to get up and running: they're positioning themselves now for major consolidations (ie. monopolies), and greasing the skids to make sure those things happen, along with more relaxed regulatory oversight on other matters (eg. Amazon donating $1 million to the inauguaration; Facebook deciding to jettison content moderation; ABC settling its $16 million defamation suit). The feeding frenzy and protection rackets are just gearing up!]

Disney Makes Antitrust Problem Go Away by Buying Majority Stake in Fubo

Disney is buying Fubo and plans to merge the sports streaming platform with its Hulu + Live TV service, gaining 70 percent ownership of the company that up until today was suing it over antitrust concerns and allegations of anticompetitive practices.

According to Fubo’s announcement today, the unified company will be known as Fubo, and Fubo executives will run it. People will also continue to be able to subscribe to Fubo without subscribing to Hulu + Live TV and vice versa. Also part of the announcement is the revelation that Fubo has settled its antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over Venu, a joint venture sports app that the companies plan to launch and that Fubo was seeking to block, citing the three firms' allegedly anticompetitive practices.

Fubo had previously claimed that Disney, Fox, and WBD had forced it to pay for irrelevant channels that don’t appeal to sports fans by bundling those networks with sports networks. Fubo’s lawsuit accused Disney and Fox of forcing it to spend millions on unwanted content and forcing it “to drop valuable channels” through price hikes. (...)

Sweetening the deal is an agreement from Disney, Fox, and WBD to pay Fubo an aggregate cash payment of $220 million upon the deal’s closure.

The merger is still subject to regulatory and Fubo shareholder approval as well as “other customary closing conditions,” per Fubo. It’s expected to take 12 to 18 months to close, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Fubo’s about-face

Fubo's merger with Disney represents a shocking about-face for the sports-streaming provider, which previously had raised alarms (citing Citi research) about Disney's ownership of 54 percent of the US sports rights market—ESPN (26.8 percent), Fox (17.3 percent), and WBD (9.9 percent). Fubo successfully got a preliminary injunction against Venu in August, and a trial was scheduled for October 2025.

Fubo CEO David Gandler said in February that Disney, Fox, and WBD “are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors.

"Each of these companies has consistently engaged in anticompetitive practices that aim to monopolize the market, stifle any form of competition, create higher pricing for subscribers, and cheat consumers from deserved choice," Gandler also said at the time.

Now, set to be a Disney company, Fubo is singing a new tune, with its announcement claiming that the merger “will enhance consumer choice by making available a broad set of programming offerings.”

In a statement today, Gandler added that the merger will allow Fubo to “provide consumers with greater choice and flexibility" and "to scale effectively," while adding that the deal "strengthens Fubo’s balance sheet” and sets Fubo up for “positive cash flow.” (...)

Disney didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“... a total deception”

Some remain skeptical about Disney buying out a company that was suing it over antitrust concerns.

"My initial reaction is that a defendant should not be able to buy its way out of antitrust liability by purchasing the plaintiff in a lawsuit. To the extent the plaintiff’s (Fubo’s) claims had any merit, then the deal will enshrine those anticompetitive effects,” Hal Singer, an economics professor at the University of Utah and managing director at Econ One, told Ars.

Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, which had joined two amicus briefs supporting Fubo's lawsuit, said in a statement shared with Ars that Fubo had previously "led sports fans and industry observers to believe they were genuinely interested in challenging Disney’s illegal joint venture in sports streaming, only to cash a check and leave consumers and the entire streaming industry worse off.

"It’s a total deception," Hepner continued. "This deal does not resolve any of the concerns laid out by Fubo in litigation against Disney’s attempts to concentrate the sports streaming market and in fact worsens the status quo. We urge President-Elect Trump’s antitrust enforcers, along with state AGs and private stakeholders, to challenge this blatantly illegal deal to protect consumers and competition.” [ed. hahahaha...it's complex, probably take four years at least.]

A statement from the American Economic Liberties Project today also described the merger as "a troubling escalation" that showed Disney "reinforcing its dominance in the sports streaming market and silencing opposition to its monopolistic practices."

"This move will leave consumers with fewer choices, higher prices, and less innovation in an already concentrated industry," the group said.

by Scharon Harding, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image:Fubo; Reddit/AZFamily; and via
[ed. From the comments: "Gangster Solves Murder Problem with More Murder", which might be a future Disney product based on the new superhero - Crime Man (he stops crimes exclusively by committing crimes, thereby out-criming the criminals). Here in action:

The Karen Carpenter Story

[ed. The music a generation played when falling in love for the first time.]

Lahaina: Do Maui Wildfire Lawyers Deserve $1 Billion In Fees?

A Maui judge will decide this month how to divide up a $4 billion settlement among many groups of lawyers representing fire victims.

A legal battle playing out behind the scenes in Maui state court could mean the difference of $1 billion for victims of the 2023 Lahaina fires.

On one side is a small army of attorneys who have already filed lawsuits for what they say are 18,000 individual plaintiffs. These lawyers, who largely drove the post-Lahaina wildfire litigation, say they represent the bulk of victims and therefore should control most of the money. If they prevail, they could make $1 billion or more in legal fees.

On the other side are class action lawyers representing an amorphous group including victims who haven’t filed. They want more money steered to the class action and away from the plaintiffʻs lawyers, who they say want an undue share at the expense of victims.

At stake for both sides is the enormous $4 billion proposed settlement for Lahaina victims, paid for by public and private institutions that played a role in the fireʻs devastation. About $800 million has been pledged by the state of Hawaii; $872.54 million by Kamehameha Schools, one of the state’s largest public charities; and $1.99 billion by Hawaiian Electric Co., the power monopoly for all of the main Hawaiian Islands except Kauai. Communications utilities and large landowners have pledged the remainder.

The battle is set to culminate in a trial on January 29, where Maui Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill will decide how to divide the pot between the two teams of lawyers to share with clients.

The individual plaintiffs’ lawyers say they should prevail because they represent the vast majority of victims, including people who suffered the most. But the class lawyers say some victims haven’t filed suit yet, which makes them part of the class, and they should be guaranteed there’s some money left.

“These guys know they can make a ton of money for doing very little work,” class action lawyer Terry Revere, said of the individual plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Class Is A Key To $4 Billion Settlement

Litigation from the Maui wildfires has played out on parallel tracks. Soon after the fires, attorneys descended on Maui, taking out advertisements in the airport and dashing to the courts.

Several class action lawsuits were filed in federal court in Honolulu. And scores of individual personal injury or property loss lawsuits were filed in state court on Maui, many by out-of-state mass-disaster lawyers teaming with lawyers licensed in Hawaii.

As the number of individual suits mushroomed, Cahill created a special proceeding to manage the cases, with four individual plaintiffs’ lawyers as liaisons.

Cahill eventually appointed mediators to help negotiate a settlement of all the wildfire lawsuits. With trials scheduled to begin in the fall of 2024 in Maui, the defendants and plaintiffs in August agreed to the proposed $4.04 billion settlement, with Gov. Josh Greenʻs office prodding the negotiations.

As part of the proposed deal, the class lawyers agreed to move their cases to state court before Cahill and into the settlement. That move addressed a lingering issue: how to deal with potential holdouts or people who hadn’t yet filed claims?

The answer was to have the class action serve as a catch-all for stray victims: those who didn’t sue would be part of the class and bound by the settlement among Hawaiʻi, Kamehameha Schools, HECO and some smaller parties.

The global insurance industry — which has paid out $2.3 billion in claims to home and business owners — remains the lone holdout to the agreement. It still wants to sue the parties at fault for the wildfires to recoup the claims it has paid. The Hawaii Supreme Court must decide whether the settlement can be final without the insurers on board.

While the court prepares for oral arguments in that case in February, Cahill has been hashing out how the class action and individual plaintiffs’ lawyers will divide the settlement money if the high court blesses the deal.

Class-action lawyers accuse the individual plaintiffs’s lawyers of being “carpetbaggers” trying to take an undue share of the pot. They say it’s better to distribute money to the class-action lawyers because distributions are subject to court oversight and must be fair, adequate and equitable, according to rules governing class actions.

Legal fees must also be approved by the court. And the class action lawyers handling the case say their fees will likely amount to less than 10% of the damages awarded, although Cahill will have the final say.

In contrast, the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to put the money into a “black box,” in which everything is private among the parties, says Revere. Individual plaintiffs’ lawyers typically charge contingency fees of 25%-40% of their damages they recover, which could be a payday of $1 billion or more, and could include substantial fees from clients signed up even after the proposed settlement was reached.

“It’s taxpayer money, it’s ratepayer money, and it’s charity money,” he added. “And once this goes into the carpetbaggers’ magic box, the court’s not going to have any control over it.”

By their estimates, at least a third of the property damage victims fall into the class, not represented by the individual plaintiffs’ lawyers, said Kyle Smith, a Kailua-based class-action lawyer. The percentages of those suffering business losses could be higher, he said.

Cynthia Wong, a Maui lawyer who serves as liaison for the individual plaintiffs, says it makes sense for them to control the lion’s share of the settlement because they did enormous amounts of work initiating lawsuits and signing up victims, assuring the most-harmed victims are compensated.

An administrator will oversee equitable distribution of money to individual victims, she said.

There shouldn’t even be a class to begin with, Wong said, because the damages suffered by victims are too varied. For example, Wong said, one category includes people who planned to travel to Lahaina between August and October of 2023 but had to cancel their trips. Itʻs unclear if Cahill would approve payment to them.

“How can you take money from the true victims and allot it to that kind of class category?” she said.

The bottom line: “The evidence will show that the class should get very, very little of this settlement.”(...)

In the end, Cahill will have to decide whether Wong and her colleagues are correct when they say the class should get very little.

Plaintiffs lawyers submitted reports showing the scope of loss for victims who have individually sued. There are an astonishing 18,543 plaintiffs associated with 8,725 addresses, among them, according to plaintiffs expert Philip Strunk. The individual plaintiffs’ lawyers represent more than 1,000 wrongful death and injury claims, another expert reported.

A construction expert estimating the costs of rebuilding at $2.3 billion.

Together the reports estimate the claims from individual plaintiffs at $6.8 billion on the low end – much more than the $4.04 billion the defendants have agreed to pay.

Expert Witness Admits Report Might Be Flawed

Revere and Smith, the class action lawyers, question some of these numbers. For example, the number of people filing suit — 18,543 — is 50% more than the total population of Lahaina before the fires, which the 2020 census had at about 12,702.

Wong defends the number, saying it makes sense that the tally of individual victims exceeds the entire population of Lahaina. For instance, she points out, a Lahaina business destroyed by the fire might have had multiple owners living outside of Lahaina.

But even Strunk admits his reported number of 18,000-some victims might be wrong because it contains “potential duplicate entries.” Multiple individual plaintiffs’ law firms apparently reported representing the same plaintiff, Strunk said in his declaration. His firm plans to implement a process to resolve the issue.

Revere said it’s not surprising that multiple firms are claiming to represent the same victims. He likened the individual plaintiffs’ lawyers to piranhas in a feeding frenzy over clients.

“As you can imagine, when you have a bunch of piranhas going after something, some of them are stealing each others’ clients,” he said.

by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Maui Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill; Hawaii Judiciary/Screenshot/2025

[ed. Who would've guessed?]

Clock is TikTok-ing

On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in TikTok, Inc. v. Garland. TikTok is challenging the constitutionality of a law passed with bipartisan support by Congress and signed by President Biden that would require TikTok to essentially cease operations in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance — a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands but controlled by China (its headquarters is in Beijing) — sells the platform to an entity not controlled by a hostile foreign power.

TikTok’s C.E.O. has denied that ByteDance is controlled by China, and claimed that the company, in which the Chinese government holds a stake, is private. The United States disagrees. In its brief before the Supreme Court, the U.S. government notes that China prohibits the export of TikTok’s algorithm, and it argues that “because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the P.R.C. regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the P.R.C.’s agenda and objectives.

As evidence of the P.R.C.’s control, the U.S. government further notes that “the P.R.C. maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ” (...).

Most people I know have strong feelings about TikTok. They love it or they hate it. TikTok is mainly a video-sharing application, and users can find themselves losing hours of their day scrolling through dance videos, practical jokes, political rants and clips from movies and television shows.

In that sense, TikTok isn’t all that different from Instagram or YouTube. Both platforms now feature short, TikTok-style videos. Instagram calls them “Reels,” while YouTube calls them “Shorts.” But what sets TikTok apart is its proprietary algorithm. It’s so effective that it can feel as if it’s reading your mind.

I’ve heard it described as “spooky” in its ability to anticipate your interests and desires. Like most social media platforms, it vacuums up your personal data and tracks the videos you watch to try to anticipate exactly what you like to see. TikTok just does it better. It’s more immersive and intimate than its competitors.

Many parents I know hate TikTok for exactly that reason. They watch it consume hours of their kids’ lives, often with the most inane content. It’s often so inane that it can almost seem malicious — as if it’s deliberately dumbing down American discourse. The Chinese version of TikTok, by contrast, has more educational content, along with time limits for minors. The American version is swimming in dreck.

But “swimming in dreck” isn’t a constitutional reason for banning a social media platform. The First Amendment doesn’t protect just academic or political debate, it also protects all the silly dances, all the absurd jokes and all the ridiculous memes you see online.

The First Amendment does not, however, protect the free expression of the Chinese government. It does not protect the commercial activities of the Chinese government. And that brings us to the question that’s at the heart of the case before the Supreme Court: Is Congress’s TikTok ban truly about content? Or is it about control?

If it’s aimed at changing the content currently on the platform, then it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. After all, there is an American TikTok subsidiary that enjoys constitutional protection, and the American creators on the app are exercising their own constitutional rights. Stopping their speech because the federal government dislikes their content would be a clear violation of the First Amendment.

There are people I respect greatly, including my good friends and former colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (I was president of FIRE from 2004 to 2005), who see the case as primarily about content.

In an amicus brief they filed along with the Institute for Justice and the Reason Foundation, they stated their case clearly: “The nationwide ban on TikTok is the first time in history our government has proposed — or a court approved — prohibiting an entire medium of communications.”

The law, FIRE argues, “imposes a prior restraint, and restricts speech based on both its content and viewpoint” and is thus either unconstitutional per se or should be subject to the “highest level of First Amendment scrutiny.”

I disagree. This case isn’t about what’s on the platform, but rather who runs the application, and the People’s Republic of China has no constitutional right to control any avenue of communications within the United States.

Think of it this way: Under the law, TikTok could remain exactly the same as it is today — with the same algorithm, the same content and the same creators — so long as it sells the company to a corporation not controlled by a foreign adversary.

Adversarial foreign control matters for all the reasons I described in my opening scenario, and it’s easy to come up with other hypothetical problems. The U.S. and China are locked in a global economic and military competition, and there are ample reasons for China to want to exercise influence over American discourse.

Americans have the constitutional right to control the expression of the companies they create. They can choose to use their own companies to promote Chinese communist messages. An American can choose to vocally support China in a shooting war between the two countries (so long as advocacy doesn’t cross into material support).

But those are American rights, not Chinese rights, and the American content creators who use TikTok have ample opportunities to create identical content on any number of competing platforms. Indeed, they often do — it’s typical to see TikTok creators posting identical videos on Instagram and YouTube.

In addition, social media companies come and go. America has survived the demise of Myspace, Friendster and Vine, and it can certainly survive without TikTok.

In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed with my assessment. The potential TikTok ban, it ruled, does not violate the First Amendment.

As the court explained, the law has two primary national security justifications: “(1) to counter the P.R.C.’s efforts to collect great quantities of data about tens of millions of Americans, and (2) to limit the P.R.C.’s ability to manipulate content covertly on the TikTok platform.”

The first justification does not implicate the content of speech at all. The second justification does implicate content, but the core issue is still control. As the court explained, “Specifically, the government invokes the risk that the P.R.C. might shape the content that American users receive, interfere with our political discourse and promote content based upon its alignment with the P.R.C.’s interests.” (...)

“Indeed,” Ginsburg wrote, “content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much P.R.C. propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing.”

The danger of TikTok used to be a rare point of agreement between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump’s administration attempted to ban TikTok during his first term. Biden signed the law that could actually make it happen.

But Trump has since changed his tune. During the campaign, he asked voters to vote for him to save TikTok, and on Dec. 27, he filed one of the most unusual legal briefs I’ve ever read. Essentially, he’s using the fact of his election victory and his social media experience to argue that he is uniquely and solely qualified to resolve the tension between American national security and the free speech rights of TikTok users.

The rhetoric of the brief is absurd. At one point it declares, “President Trump is one of the most powerful, prolific and influential users of social media in history.” Another section states, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government.”

This isn’t a legal argument. It’s a love letter to Dear Leader Trump. It also flunks basic civics. Trump’s electoral win does not grant him special privileges to set aside a law that’s scheduled to go into effect before he takes office. Nor does his victory grant him special judicial deference to his constitutional judgment.

It’s unclear exactly why Trump changed his mind about TikTok. One of its major investors is a significant Trump donor, and Trump has almost 15 million followers on the platform. But regardless of the reasons, Trump’s policy preferences are irrelevant to the constitutional analysis.

The Supreme Court should give Trump a civics lesson. He does not have special authority to set aside laws that he dislikes. It should also draw a bright line between American speech, which is protected by the Constitution, and Chinese control of an American media outlet, which is not.

In many ways, this is the first Supreme Court case of a new cold war, this time with China, and it presents us with a constitutional I.Q. test. We can and should zealously defend the free speech rights of Americans, including their rights to dance, sing and meme away. But we cannot make it this easy for a hostile foreign power to collect our data and manipulate our public debate.

by David French, NY Times|  Read more:

Image: Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Alfred Gescheidt and ullstein bild/Getty Images

[ed. Not so sure. Conceivably this argument could be applied to any number of other businesses that aren't involved in data collection, 'communications', or 'propaganda': eg. software development, military arms technology, AI, nanotechnology, etc. So, China has a controlling influence in a business that operates in the US. Will a bit of paper shuffling eliminate that influence? Call me sceptical. And, why would we assume the US (CIA/NSA, etc.) isn't playing the same game? Or Russia? Smells fishy, like we're not getting some clear reasoning/motivations here.]

DR Pigekoret (feat. Luna Ersahin)

[ed. I initially posted DR Pigekoret (Danish National Girl's Choir) a little further below, with an excellent (and emotional) cover of Billy Joel's 'And So It Goes'. Here's another beautiful live performance, featuring Luna Erashin. I'd never heard of her before, but wow... very impressive. There's also this:]