#tucson home buying

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When private equity destroys your hospital

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 9-10), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn't ever get away with putting in a novel.

Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care.

(Buckle up.)

Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/

Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using "leveraged buyouts." That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use the company itself as collateral: it's like you getting a bank-loan to buy your neighbor's mortgage out from under them, and using your neighbor's house as collateral for that loan.

Once the buyout is done, the PE fund pays itself a "special dividend" (stealing money the business needs to survive) and then starts charging the business a "management fee" for the PE fund's expertise. To pay for all this, the PE bosses start to hack away at the company. Quality declines. So do wages. Prices go up. The company changes suppliers, opting for cheaper alternatives, often stiffing the old company. There are mass layoffs. The remaining employees end up doing three peoples' jobs, for lower wages, with fewer materials of lower quality.

Eventually, that top-feeding PE company finds a more desperate, more ham-fisted PE company to unload the business onto. That middle-feeding company also does a leveraged buyout, pays itself another special dividend, cuts wages, staffing and quality even further. They switch to even worse suppliers and stiff the last batch. Prices go up even higher.

Then – you guessed it – the middle-feeding PE company finds an even more awful PE bottom-feeder to unload the company onto. That bottom feeder does it all again, without even pretending to leave the business in condition to do its job. The company is a shambling zombie at this point, often producing literal garbage in place of the products that made its reputation. Employees' paychecks bounce, or don't show up at all. The company stops bothering to pay the lawyers that have been fending off its creditors. Those lawyers sue the company, too.

That's the kind of PE company Steward Health was, and, as the name suggests, Steward Health is in the business of stripping away the very last residue of value from community hospitals. As you might imagine, this gets pretty fucking ugly.

Steward owns 32 hospitals up and down the country, though its holdings are dwindling as the company walks away from its debt-burdened holdings, after years of neglect that have rendered them unfit for use as health facilities – or for any other purpose. Tcacik's piece offers a snapshot of one such hospital: Florida's Rockledge Regional Medical Center, just eight miles from Cape Canaveral.

Rockledge is a disaster. The fifth floor was, at one point, home to 5,000 bats.

Five.

Thousand.

Bats.

(Rockledge stiffed the exterminators.)

The bats were just the beginning. One of the internal sewage pipes ruptured. Whole sections of the hospital were literally full of shit, oozing out of the walls and ceiling, slopping over medical equipment.

That's an urgent situation for any hospital, but for Rockledge, it's catastrophic, because Rockledge is a hospital without any hospital supplies. Steward has stiffed the companies that supply "heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper." Key medical equipment has been repossessed. So have the Pepsi machines. The hospital cafeteria had its supply of cold cuts repossessed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1agc1j4/comment/kolicqo/

It's not just Steward's nonpayments that reek of impending doom. Its payments also bear the hallmarks of a scam artist on the brink of blowing off the con. The company recently paid off a vendor with five separate checks for $1m, each drawn on "a random hospital in Utah" (Steward recently walked away from its Utah hospitals; its partners there are suing it for stealing $18m on their way out the door).

This company – which owns 32 hospitals! – has resorted to gambits like sending photos of fake checks to doctors it hasn't paid in months as "proof" that the money was coming (the checks arrived 22 days later).

Steward owes so much money to its employees – $1.66m to just one doctors' group. But the medical staff keep doing their jobs, and are reluctant to speak on the record, thanks to Steward's reputation for vicious retaliation. Those health workers keep showing up to take care of patients, even as the hospital crumbles around them. One clinician told Tcacik: "I watched a bed collapse underneath a [patient] who had just undergone hip surgery."

Rockledge has nine elevators, but only five of them work – the other four have been broken for a year. The hospital's fourth floor has been converted to "a graveyard of broken beds." The sinks are clogged, or filled with foul gunk. There's black mold. Nurses have noted on the maintenance tags that the repair service refuses to attend the hospital until their overdue bills are paid. The fifteen-person on-site maintenance team was cut to just two workers.

Steward is just the latest looting owner of Rockledge. After the Great Financial Crisis, private equity consultants helped sell it to Health Management Associates. The hospital's CEO took home a $10m bonus for that sale and exited; Health Management Associates then quickly became embroiled in a Medicare fraud and kickback scandal. Soon after, Rockledge was passed on to Community Health Systems, who then sold it on to Rockledge.

Steward, meanwhile, was at that time owned by an even bigger private equity giant, Cerberus, which then sold Steward off. That deal was performatively complex and hid all kinds of mischief. Prior to Cerberus's sell-off of Steward, they sold off Steward's real-estate. The buyer was Medical Properties Trust, who gave Cerberus $1.25b for the real-estate: three hospitals in Florida and three more in Ohio. Steward then contracted to operate these hospitals on MPT's behalf, and pay MPT rent for the real-estate.

This complex arrangement was key to siphoning value out of the hospital and to keeping angry creditors at bay – if you can't figure out who owes you money, it's a lot harder to collect on the debt. The scheme was masterminded by Steward founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre. De la Torre is notorious for taking a massive dividend out of the company while it owed $1.4b to its creditors. He bought a $40m yacht with the money.

De la Torre was once feted as a business genius who would "disrupt" healthcare. But as Steward's private jet hops around "Corfu, Santorini, St. Maarten and Antigua" as its hospitals literally crumble, he's becoming less popular. In Massachusetts, politicians have railed against Steward and de la Torre (Governor Healey wants the company to leave the state "as soon as possible").

Florida, by contrast, is much more friendly to Steward. The state Health and Human Services Committee chair Randy Fine is an ardent admirer of hospital privatization and is currently campaigning to sell off the last community hospital in Brevard County. The state inspectors are likewise remarkably tolerant of Steward's little peccadillos. The quasi-governmental agency that inspects hospitals has awarded this shit-and-bat-filled, elevator-free, understaffed rotting hulk "A" grades for quality.

These inspectors jointly represent a mismatched assortment of private and public agencies, dominated by a nonprofit called Leapfrog, the brainchild of Harvard public-health prof Lucian Leape, who founded it in 2000. Leapfrog likes to tout its "transparent" assessment criteria, and Steward are experts at hitting those criteria, spending the exact minimum to tick every box that Leapfrog inspectors use as proxies for overall quality and safety.

This is a pretty great example of Goodhart's Law: "every measurement eventually becomes a target, whereupon it ceases to be a good measurement":

https://xkcd.com/2899/

But despite Steward's increasingly furious creditors and its decaying facilities, the company remains bullish on its ability to continue operations. Medical Properties Trust – the real estate investment trust that is nominally a separate company from Steward – recently hosted a conference call to reassure Wall Street investors that it would be a going concern. When a Bank of America analyst asked MPT's CFO how this could possibly be, given the facility's dire condition and Steward's degraded state, the CFO blithely assured him that the company would get bailouts: "We own hospitals no one wants to see closed."

That's the thing about PE and health-care. The looters who buy out every health-care facility in a region understand that this makes them too big to fail: no matter how dangerous the companies they drain become, local governments will continue to prop them up. Look at dialysis, a market that's been cornered by private equity rollups. Today, if you need this lifesaving therapy, there's a good chance that every accessible facility is owned by a private equity fund that has fired all its qualified staff and ceased sterilizing its needles. Otherwise healthy people who visit these clinics sometimes die due to operator error. But they chug along, because no dialysis clinics is worse that "dialysis clinics where unqualified sadists sometimes kill you with dirty needles":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

The bad news is that private equity has thoroughly colonized the entire medical system. They took hospitals, fired the doctors, then took over the doctors' groups that provided outsource staff to the hospital:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

It's illegal for private equity companies to own doctors' practices (doctors have to own these), but they obfuscated the crime with a paper-thin pretext that they got away with despite its obvious bullshittery:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

The financier who decides whether you live or die depends on an algorithm that literally sets a tolerable level of preventable deaths for the patients trapped in the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

Private equity also took over emergency rooms and boobytrapped them with "surprise billing" – junk fees that ran to thousands of dollars that you had to pay even if the hospital was in network with your insurer. They made billions from this, and spent a many millions from that booty keeping the scam alive with scare ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The whole health stack is colonized by private equity-backed monopolies. Even your hospital bed!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

Then there's residential care. Private equity cornered many regional markets on nursing homes and turned them into slaughterhouses, places where you go to die, not live:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

The palliative care sector is also captured by private equity. PE bosses hire vast teams of fast-talking salespeople who con vulnerable older people into entering an end-of-life system before they are ready to die. Thanks to loose regulation, the nation is filled with fake hospices that can rake in millions from Medicare while denying all care to their patients (hospice patients don't get life-extending medication or procedures, by definition):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

If you survive this long enough, Medicare eventually tells the hospice that you're clearly not dying and you get kicked off their rolls. Now you have to go through the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare of convincing the system – which was previously informed that you were at death's door – that you are actually viable and need to start getting care again (good luck with that).

If that kills you, guess what? Private equity has rolled up funeral homes up and down the country, and they will scam your survivors just as hard as the medical system that killed you did:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

The PE sector spent more than a trillion dollars over the past decade buying up healthcare companies, and it has trillions more in "dry powder" allocated for further medical acquisitions. Why not? As the CFO of Medical Properties Trust told that Bank of America analyst last week, when you "own hospitals no one wants to see closed." you literally can't fail, no matter how many people you murder.

The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit.

Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler's Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz's wholesale murder in the shade. Farben's slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were "just following order" but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: "We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits." 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/retaliation#charnel-house

#pluralistic #Rockledge Regional Medical Center #private equity #looting #Steward Health #ponzis #maureen tcacik #Medical Properties Trust #Ralph de la Torre #Massachusetts #florida #Cerberus #too big to fail #pe #guillotine watch

[anticapitalistclown]

hello! I've been reading your recent scenarios and I'm wondering if I could ask you a Ma Taesoo smut with fem reader, thank you and I wish you well

here you have, and I wish you well too! <3

Ma Taesoo x fem!reader

warnings: nsfw, smut, p in v, size difference

Working as Ma Taesoo's assistant was the best opportunity life offered you, since you started working for him you just not only had a great income, but you also had a great bond with your boss. Sometimes you couldn't even believe how you went from getting rejected on all your job applications, having a hard time to bring some income home to now driving a Hyundai Tucson to work, gesture of your boss the ex-delinquent that everyone was reluctant and scared to work for and who you gave an opportunity.

You've just arrived to the land on the mountain that Taesoo is about to buy, your boss is already there talking with the vendor, they seemed to discuss about the price so you rushed over there "do your magic" Taesoo pat your shoulder and you winked back at him. After walking around the lands while negotiating with the vendor, you returned to your boss with the signed contract "all yours and I even haggled a bit under the estimated price" Taesoo smiled at you "good job there" he patted your head "maybe I might buy you another car as a reward" he leaned against his car "another big one like mine, you look good driving big cars" you blushed at the compliment and noded "it's all thanks to you, boss" you both gave each other an accomplice smile and drove to Taesoo's house in the woods, there he has all the paperwork regarding the lands management.

You sat on his office, he calmly offered you a blanket to warm yourself and left you working alone, the little office was comfortable and the fact that it just started raining helped you focus a bit, the blanket, smelled of Taesoo, his cologne was there, you could only think about using a blanket that Taesoo also used. You snuggled on the blanket smelling at it as if it was the best smell, your cheeks burned and you closed your thighs, then you jolted by Taesoo's sudden irruption "y/n, it's raining lots so you're gonna stay here tonight, you already have a room prepare-" Taesoo focused on your snuggling self "are you feeling cold?" you denied "I'm fine, just the blanket is really comfortable" you stared at each other in silent "fine, I'll prepare dinner" Taesoo broke the silence and left. Your heart was racing fast, you already stayed nights as his place, it was usual due to him living in the mountains, you and his boys stayed actually a lot over but this time you couldn't take off your head your boss, lewd scenarios flooded your mind, your breathing was heavier, you placed the finished paperwork and rushed over to see him.

Taesoo was in the kitchen his breath also heavy, he said really bold of him about you staying tonight when he doesn't even know if he could be capable of controlling himself, not after all the perverted thoughts he had lately of you, he felt bad, you trust him as a boss as someone to rely on. He noticed you, you were at the door, your skirt more lifted that usual from sitting all day, your breath was also heavy, your face all red and your lips pouty, he walked towards you "Taesoo, I'm cold" you said to him, you were so nervous that you could feel your blood rushing around your head "don't worry angel, I got you" Taesoo caught your indirect and rushed towards you his hands grabbed your waist, your arms around his shoulders in a matter of seconds you already where making out. Taesoo's kisses were rough and desperate, he didn't show any signs of letting go of you, he lifted you, your legs around his waist his hands grabbing your ass, it was too much "Taesoo" you broke the kiss "I want you" Taesoo smiled at you and walked towards his bedroom kissing your neck "I'm gonna make you mine dear".

His bedroom was warm, a fireplace was the source of warm and light in his room, Taesoo dropped you on his big and comfortable bed and suddenly, you where under him and your shirt and bra got removed in one go, his hands already removing your skirt, you joined him and started to unbutton his shirt, he teared it revealing his naked torso your naked body being hugged by him his lips kissing from your neck to your chest then your legs, his fingers teasing your pussy, little moans already escaping from your lips, he slipped two of his fingers inside, his eyes focused on all your body "you're so beautiful" you let out a moan and he rushed the movement of his fingers "they're long!" you moaned, his fingers were deep and felt so good against your walls "yes they are, do they make you feel good?" you nodded Taesoo gave a kiss in your lips then traveled down and he gave a peck to your clit, making you shiver, your reaction gave him joy, his mouth was savoring you "Ta-Taesoo! ah!" you could hear the lewd sound that his fingers and mouth made against your pussy the pleasure made your legs tremble and then he bullied more that gummy spot that instantly made you cum at the touch "good girl, you will give me more, right?" Taesoo brushed your cheek you shyly nodded "so smart and competent, I'll make sure to give you the best fuck as reward" Taesoo undressed completely, his dick, big, slapped his stomach and you swallowed, his hand grasped it and you bit your lips, you got closer to him, his hand directing yours to his dick you slowly moved your hand up and down, his breathing was heavy, Taesoo found your hand so tiny around his dick "you're so big" it slipped from your lips making Taesoo chuckle "you look good with big things".

He easily placed you on his lap, your back resting on his chest, his left hand grabbing your throat and his right teasing your clit, from his position he could see all your body, his eyes fixed on your cunt, your pussy stretched by his cock "cum for me baby, let me feel it" you groaned loudly, your head fell on his shoulder your legs fighting to not close your hips desperately moving up, your walls tightening around his dick "that's it princess, you've got it" Taesoo increased the speed of his fingers circling your clit making your moans more louder making you cum so hard.

Taesoo moved you back to lay in bed, slowly kissing you, slowly caressing your body, slowly making time to appreciate you. Once you were back to you senses, Taesoo aligned his cock again to your entrance, slowly entering, making you feel every inch again, your walls adjusted him well so he started moving slowly, watching all your reactions before you opened your mouth "Taesoo! go harder!" Taesoo placed your ankles over his shoulder "as the princess wants" he left all his worries of hurting you and started to pound you like a beast, his strokes hitting deep made your eyes go back, erratic moans and breathing, Taesoo was so proud "good, my princess, you're taking it like a champ" he grabbed your waist and pounded rougher " I-I can feel you" you opened your mouth wide and left a silent moan "mhm good" Taesoo praised you, not minding much but letting you speak "I can feel you here" you pointed at the bulge he made on your stomach "boss is so deep" Taesoo fixed his gaze on your stomach the little bulge appearing every time he pounded in, it made for Taesoo one of his now favorite views a motivation to keep hitting you deep an so along with the praises coming from him, the way he hit so so deep, his size, everything, was so much enough to drive you to your orgasm again, your walls squeezed him hard, trapping him, your nails clawing at his back and along your moans made him cum right after you.

He cuddled you in his arms, a blanket covering you both while you were recovering your breaths, your gaze on the fireplace, his hands caressing your hair "I don't want this to be an only one time thing" you spoke to him worried, afraid that the heat of before had ruined your relationship, Taesoo kissed you forehead "as if I would let you go away, princess you're not going to get away from me so easily, not when you're so perfect for me" you accommodate on his chest, happy to spend the night with him.

#lookism #lookism x reader #ma taesoo #taesoo ma #lookism smut

[oliverreedmasterass]

Roxanne - 4k words, Jake insists that everyone should participate in a new drinking game, bets are made, and things almost immediately descend into chaos

Heat Above - 4k words, the guys get up to some hijinks and hair trouble on the set of their Heat Above music video 

It’s Been - 3.8k words, Jake picks a pointless fight with Josh and it takes them one week to finally let it go (oddly enough, based on the Barenaked Ladies song, One Week) 

Argh - 3.5k words, Jake, Josh, and Sam are all little kids, indulging in a fun and dramatic game of imaginary pirates

Sunshine - 2k words, 12 year old Jake meets his famous Gibson SG guitar for the first time

It’s Giving - 4k words, my interpretation of what happened backstage before the guys took the stage in Tucson, slaying the house down with their stage makeup

Stage Fright (pt. 1) - 2.7k words, the guys have to work through some nerves before playing new music at the Sacramento DIG show

Stage Fright (pt. 2) - 3.5k words, the aftermath of the last show of the DIG tour, some angst, and a stressful trip to In N’ Out

They Say It’s Your Birthday - 4.4k words, Danny and Sam take the twins to a karaoke bar to celebrate their 27th birthday

Welcome to My Crib - 2.8k words, Greta Van Fleet gives a home tour for Architectural Digest 

Thirst Tweets - 2k words, Greta Van Fleet react to Thirst Tweets for Buzzfeed 

New York Runaway - 800 words, the GVF group chat is popping off when Sam disappears to New York without any explanation 

Sam Kiszka Sees God While Eating Spicy Wings - 7.9k words, Sam goes on Hot Ones and frankly kinda terrifies Sean Evans

GVF Masterclass Group Chat - 1.2k words, a look at the group chat between Oliver Reed, Cal A Bungah, Chip Bunker, and Dr. JMK

Booze Run - 3k words, the GVF guys come up with a game to make their booze run a bit more entertaining

The Greta Van Fleetles - 3.2k words, GVF go on America’s Got Talent, impersonating one of the most popular bands of all time

Addressing Your Questions and Concerns Pt. 2 - 7.6k words, Literally what the title says lol 

Clowning Around - 4.1k words, Oliver Reed is alive, he’s just stuck in a witness protection program because he accidentally stumbled across a ninja clown crime ring

Rising With the Demons Above - 5.2k words, Greta Van Fleet witness a demonic possession and, of course, end up making things like 20x worse

Ready for the Garden - 1.8k words, Jake reflects on his success, and how Greta Van Fleet finally played Madison Square Garden

Turkey Day - 4.3k words, Jake decides he wants to host Thanksgiving this year, and Josh is immediately skeptical that he's up to no good 

Prime Suspects - 8k words, The GVF guys find themselves caught in a heap of trouble. The problem is, they can't quite work out what they did.

Growth - 2.4k words, Danny will go to great lengths to ensure that he can grow facial hair

Hexed - 27k words, Jake physically can’t stop singing and dancing and it seems that there must be some dark magic involved. Will the guys be able to get Jake back to normal before their show?

Summer of 69 - 39k words, Greta Van Fleet somehow manage to travel back in time to the Woodstock Art and Music festival

The Frozen Light - 48k words, In the quiet town of Frankenmuth, a string of missing persons cases opens a wider question about who is to blame, drawing a deep divide between the town and its hidden supernatural residents. 

Battle of the Bands - 29k words, A young Greta Van Fleet find hope in a local battle of the bands competition to finally catch their big break.

Episode 1 - 5k words, Josh struggles with writer’s block, Jake is certain he’s being haunted, and Sam and Danny are engaged in an intense prank war

Episode 2 - 6.7k words, The members of Greta Van Fleet deal with loss: Josh loses his beloved notebook (which Sam attempts to find) and Jake and Danny get hopelessly lost in the woods

Episode 3 - 5.9k words, After an incident involving Jake's amp, he's determined to win the cash to buy a replacement. Meanwhile, Josh and Danny choreograph a dance for a music video and Sam's clumsiness makes him see red. 

The One Where They Play Monopoly - 1.5k words, On a slow day, GVF decides to play a friendly game of Monopoly that winds up being anything but that

Greta Van Fleet Go To A Haunted House - 4.7k words, GVF make their way to a haunted house for shits and giggles. 

#greta van fleet #gvf #greta van fic #gvf fic #gvf fanfic #gvf fanfiction #fanfic #fan fiction #jake kiszka #josh kiszka #sam kiszka #danny wagner #jake gvf #josh gvf #sam gvf #danny gvf

[warningsine]

TEMPE, Ariz. (AP) — The Arizona Coyotes are officially headed to Salt Lake City.

The NHL Board of Governors voted unanimously Thursday to approve a $1.2 billion sale from Alex Meruelo to Utah Jazz owners Ryan and Ashley Smith, clearing the way for the franchise’s move to Utah next season.

The deal includes a provision for Arizona to get an expansion team if a new arena is built within the next five years. The deal will be facilitated through the NHL, with $200 million going to league owners as a relocation fee.

“We expressed our interest publicly with the NHL,” Ryan Smith told The Associated Press. “It’s probably been two years where we’ve said, ‘Hey, look, we really believe Utah can be an incredible hockey town.’ You look at all the demographics, we were just talking about the Olympics and you think about the Olympics coming back. It all kind of made sense.”

Smith will take over the franchise’s hockey operations and Meruelo will maintain his business operations in Arizona in an effort to secure and develop a tract of land for a new arena in north Phoenix.

Meruelo also retains ownership of the Tucson Roadrunners, the franchise’s AHL affiliate, and hopes to move them to Mullett Arena, the Coyotes’ temporary home shared with Arizona State University the past two seasons. He plans to pay back the $1 billion once an expansion team is approved.

“The NHL’s belief in Arizona has never wavered,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement. “We thank Alex Meruelo for his commitment to the franchise and Arizona, and we fully support his ongoing efforts to secure a new home in the desert for the Coyotes. We also want to acknowledge the loyal hockey fans of Arizona, who have supported their team with dedication for nearly three decades while growing the game.”

Meruelo will retain the Coyotes’ name, logo and trademark, so Smith’s group will have to rename the team. The team will play at Delta Center, home of the Jazz, until a new arena can be built.

“We’ll start with Utah on the jersey and we’ll figure out the logo and everything else, and what it is that we are, but that’s a one-way door,” Smith said. “You’ve got to do it once. And with this timeline, I think both the league feels better and we feel better to just run the process and then we’ll drop it when we drop it.”

The sale ends the Coyotes’ long-running bid to find a permanent home.

The franchise shared an arena with the NBA’s Phoenix Suns after relocating from Winnipeg, moved to Glendale and ended up at Mullett Arena when the city of Glendale backed out of a lease agreement.

Meruelo had been adamant about not wanting to sell the team despite receiving numerous offers since buying the team in 2019. When an auction for the land in north Phoenix got pushed back to June, the Coyotes had no guarantee a deal for a new arena would go through.

With the NHL and players’ association hesitant for the Coyotes to play at 5,000-seat Mullett Arena for a third season, Meruelo opted to sell the team, his focus shifting to the new arena and expansion team.

“I agree with Commissioner Gary Bettman and the National Hockey League, that it is simply unfair to continue to have our players, coaches, hockey front office, and the NHL teams they compete against, spend several more years playing in an arena that is not suited for NHL hockey,” Meruelo said in a statement. “But this is not the end for NHL hockey in Arizona. I have negotiated the right to reactivate the team within the next five years, and have retained ownership of the beloved Coyotes name, brand and logo. I remain committed to this community and to building a first-class sports arena and entertainment district without seeking financial support from the public.”

The Coyotes played their final game in Arizona on Wednesday night, a 5-2 win over the playoff-bound Edmonton Oilers. The players celebrated on the ice with team personnel and a few handed their sticks over the glass to fans, who chanted “We love you Coy-otes!”

“It’s tough to take it all in,” Coyotes rookie forward Logan Cooley said. “A lot of noise, a lot of personal stuff and obviously the organization, you hear you’re going one spot then you’re going to the next spot. We’ve done a good job in this locker room focusing on keeping out the noise and getting better as a team, striving to be the team we want to be one day.”

Officials from Salt Lake City and the city’s 2034 Olympic bid supported Smith’s attempt to bring hockey to Utah, giving the state two major professional franchises.

“This announcement is about more than bringing an NHL team to Salt Lake City — it’s a defining moment in our trajectory, becoming a catalyst for a positive vision that integrates community, connection, and more possibilities for families, residents, and visitors to experience our capital city,” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said in a statement. “I’m thankful for the close partnership with Ryan & Ashley Smith, and the entire SEG team. This is the beginning of a new era that will generate exciting opportunities for our communities, amplify pride and unlock new potential in our downtown core.”

___

#sports #ice hockey #news tag

[morbidology]

39-year-old Charles Morgan appeared as though he lived a very unassuming life. He worked as an escrow agent in Tucson, Arizona, and lived at home with his wife and children. However, most didn’t know, that at least according to him, he was working as an agent for the federal government, offering assistance in combating organised crime.

On 22 March, 1977, Charles disappeared without a trace. His family heard nothing from him until a couple of days later, when he burst through the front door of their Tucson home. As he silently rummaged through the house, he grabbed a pen and piece of paper and detailed a bizarre story. He wrote down that he was unable to speak because he had been kidnapped, tortured, and then hallucinogenic drug poured down his throat, rendering him speechless. Of course his wife wanted to go immediately to authorities but Charles refused and then detailed his involvement with the government.

Two months later, Charles disappeared once again. However, this time he wouldn’t be returning home. 11 days later, his body was discovered alongside his discarded car 40 miles west of his home. There was a bullet wound to the back of his head and he was clad in a bulletproof vest and armed with a knife and holster. He had been shot with his own .357-caliber magnum which was completely devoid of any fingerprints. Even more bizarre, one of his own teeth was discovered wrapped up in his pocket as well as a pair of sunglasses that didn’t belong to him and a piece of paper with directions of how to get to the murder site. Pinned to his underwear, investigators found a dollar bill.

The dollar bill had seven Spanish names written on the face as well as a bible citation - Ecclesiastes 12:1-8. Before Charles’ body was discovered, his wife received an odd phone call from a woman who referred to herself as “Green Eyes.” The woman said nothing other than her name and the same bible citation that was found on the dollar bill. This mysterious woman made herself known to police and told them that she had known Charles and that she had seen him before his death. He showed the woman a briefcase stocked with money that he said he was using to buy off a hit man who had been hired to kill him.

Nevertheless, Charles’ death was ruled as suicide and the mysterious Green Eyes disappeared after telling authorities her side of the story. So why did he meet his demise? One theory is that he certainly was working as a secret agent which would make him a target for many unsavory characters. Another theory is that his escrow business was a ploy for money laundering which went south. What’s clear, to most at least, is that Charles, clad in a bulletproof vest, certainly didn’t shoot himself in the back of the head even if the FBI likes to claim so.

#Charles Morgan #mystery #bizarre #history #true crime

[akizuke]

the most fucked up thing thats ever happened to me drunk was [redacted] but the other most fucked up thing was when i went to a HEALTH concert in tucson and i bought a shirt from what was apparantly just a member of the band which is insane to me like you just work your own merch stand? okay slay but i bought the shirt and im wearing it over another shirt and a sweater and a skirt and its like 90 degrees but im really blitzed on coke and alcohol so i dont care and my friend is looking at the shirt while im sitting in the bathtub screaming about communism and hes like theres a number on the shirt and. well. we call it. and its the same fucking member of the band that sold me the shirt who answers it. and im like hello? oh my god this number goes to the band? and he was like. yeah. and i ask him between laughs if it gets annoying to have random people call and he says. yeah. and i get so embarassed i say goodbye and hang up and btw i fucking embarassed myself in front of this guy already when i was buying the shirt because i had taken so many hits off my friends dab pen that i was incosolable and slow as shit so i have to spend the rest of my life aware that for one night i fucking tortured i think the guitarist of one of my favorite bands. oh and on the way back home i accidentally warped the vinyl record of theirs i bought at the concert and whenver i play it i am reminded of my crimes

#sakizuke

[cosmicblame]

Okay. Long catharsis post just so I can see what I put myself through

(Bonus, this is how you get a passport in the US fast)

Jan 17th- I submitted a passport renewal, paid for expedited processing (at the time was it was estimated at 3-5 weeks)

Feb 10th- check the (v shitty) online portal, and see my materials have just been received. Note somewhere on the website that processing went from 3-5 weeks and grew to 5-7 weeks. They start the clock the day they RECEIVE the materials.

(Flight is March 16th)

Feb 28th- get laid off

March 2nd- call passport hotline to ask what's up... gets through (A MIRACLE as I will learn on this journey). Told to call back tomorrow

March 3rd- call. A fucking uwu woman is all like "you're chill. You need your passport by the 10th because you need a visa?? No problem. It will be there. Seriously. No problems. None. What. So. Ever"

March 8th- the online portal is still working. Indicates "still in process". Takes about 10 calls to get through to an agent. I say "how am I supposed to receive the passport by the 10th if it hasn't shipped yet?" I get yelled at for being naive to believe they can just tell me when I'll get my passport and that's how the system works.

I have the option of an in person appointment March 9th at 10am.

... In Puerto Rico or Monday in Honolulu.

I see if I can make it happen. I can't. Because I gave no new income... and I have no new income because I filed for the half week I worked/was laid-off, and unemployment is now contesting whether I was actually laid off.

[March 9, 10, 13, & 14] I call passport people upwards of 20x a day. Sometimes, it is just broken. Sometimes they're too busy. Sometimes, they tell me there are no in-person appointments.

[During this time my SNAP and Medicaid benefits fall through the bureaucratic cracks of hell.

I stress make an entire outfit, teaching myself pleating for bishop sleeves. I look fly as fuck]

March 9th- portal breaks. Otherwise-known-as: exclusively for anyone who's documents were received the week my documents were received, it just says "NA gov't borked". Weirdly find out my passport is in Tucson. Which is weird because there is an office in Philly.

I freak out. Deep dive on the internet. Read on Reddit that they accept a VERY limited number of walk-ins. But you have to be first. So show up early.

March 10th- Show up in person 1.5 hours before opening (6:30) in 30 degree whether.

Meet a vet trying to go to Mexico to treat his PTSD with psilocybin and a lesbian who works at Home Depot. They are my saving grace.

THEY NO LONGER TAKE IN PERSON APPOINTMENTS. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Home depot lesbian tells us we can call our U.S. Rep.

Call immediately. Leave a message.

[Weekend break]

March 13th- don't hear anything from Rep. Decide to walk into Senator's office. Get yelled at again. I probably wasn't yelled at, but I still cried. You nerd an appointment (nobody picked up to schedule an appointment).

My saint of a best friend tells me I need to sign a waiver of privacy for these reps to act on my behalf. 30 minutes later I'm on the phone with a public worker/aide. THEY. GENUINELY. WANT. TO. HELP. THEY ARE THE BEST.

My Senator is new and the office required me to print the waiver for a "wet signature". Who has a printer? CVS. Go to CVS ten minutes before closing.

As an aside: All "rush" companies cannot help you if you have an application in. They are stupidly expensive. Scam.

Well, I reached out to them because the Passport Agency used to have an online system and these companies used bots to take the appointment and sell them. I tried to buy an appointment. Nada.

Portal still broken so I can't tell when my passport might be ready so I could adjust flights so that I don't abandon my best friend who isn't comfortable traveling alone as a woman.

March 14th- Senator aide calls to tells me my application has been delayed because I wanted an X as my gender marker. He can get me an appointment as long as I push my travel back a day. I buy a last-minute flight to show immenent travel plans proof <- a requirement to walk into passport office.

Flights within 3 days of travel are not cheap.

After the phone call I cancel the flight because it was expensive as shit, within 24 hours of booking (P.S. insurance that allows you to cancel at any point... only allow you to cancel if you're sick. Not just for fun and games), and the passport appointment is same day as the original flight I bought when I had a job. So I am calculating timewise if I can get the passport and still get to NYC to still catch my original flight.

I get a WILDLY cheap train ticket that leaves 5 hours later... at midnight.

March 15th- midnight 2 hour train to New York City. 5 hour "layover/connection". Decide to stay at my best friends. Construction on the subway means it takes an hour and a half to get to her. I sleep for an hour and a half and get on the hour and half subway back to the train station. 8 hour train ride through Western NY (snowy. Was not planning for that, shoes and socks got soaked through).

On the train, U.S. Rep aide calls says "even though your passport application was denied because not all federal facilities can give you an X as a gender indicator, I got them to print it with what it was on your original passport. It's printed and shipping... sir"

Me: 👀, I'm on a train to Buffalo, I called and told your office yesterday.

Him: keep the appointment

Stay on the train. Found out the ticket was so cheap because it was not technically all the way to Buffalo. Just some rinkadink station outside of Buffalo. Have to Uber into town.

Airbnb a room in a lady's house. The cats and dog were my saving grace.

March 16th (day of flight)- POWER walk to passport agency. Listening to strut songs. Realize I'm going to make this work.... then realize I need a visa to enter and that takes time (website says 4 days) to process. But you need a pic of your passport so I couldn't have started it earlier).

Wait for passport printing. Walking around freezing downtown. Random delivery guy tells me I walk fast because he saw me going the other way an hour earlier. I pull charm out of somewhere. Get complimented on my ass. "Thanks I grew it myself"

Literally just wander around aimlessly. Eavesdrop on someone coming out as nb and starting estrogen; I am stressed, I am fragile, I start WEEPING in public.

Go to passport office- "you have two passports. One is void. Good luck. P.S. Sir, hey the gender marker thing is weird, huh? You can reapply in a year, free of charge and get it fixed" Immediately apply for visa. Pay too much out or pocket for 24 hour processing. It needs to be physically printed once its issued. Scheming how to print it during our layover in London.

Get notification that the shipped passport has been delivered back home.

Share an Uber to the airport with someone else who got their passport (thank you so much).

Learn that my sister needed her visa checked to go through security in US. Start stressing.

2 hour flight to NYC.

Arrive in the same terminal as my flight to London and realize I don't need to show TSA my visa.

Try to get my ticket after checking in online. Can't. Go to desk. Explain the entire situation. "Sir, I know it's not your fault. We get charged a fee if you try and enter a country without a visa. Cannot be done. Unless you break up your tickets and get charged current day market rates flights and hope you get your visa during your layover but you're essentially getting charged double for this flight at same day prices.

If you get it tomorrow, you can come back and try again."

In my best friend's arms: My best friend flies. I cries.

Take the one and a half hour subway back to her place. Google to take a bus. No bus shows up. Twice. It's midnight. I've had a handful of almonds for dinner. I cry. Get on the wrong subway. Get on the right subway.

She has cleared out her food because of this travel. I fall asleep exhausted. Wake up every hour to see if visa came through.

It doesn't. Walk to CVSs to see if they have printing. They don't. Trying to figure out what to do. Visa comes through. Take a discounted lyft to FedEx. Print. Walk to subway. To commuter train. To airway train.

Go to check in desk. And since I'm tired of coming out and getting dirty looks I just say "I missed my flight". The check-in clerk says the fees to change my flight will be $700

I cry. I explain why I couldn't apply for my visa because a federal agency doesn't have consistency and does not tell you that some of them just can't offer gender affirmation even though it's on the form. This clerk works some magic and the fees are waived.

I have to wait 10 hours until my 17 hour flight.

This better be the only fucking time this cousin gets married.

The amount of trains, planes, and automobiles I've taken. The lack of good consistent sleep. The amount of coming out I've done. The truly lack of awareness of what that means (and/or the cruel intention of not abiding by it). The amount of faith that I can navigate and figure out my public insurance, food supplement, and unemployment... is terrifying. I'll be fucked otherwise.

I'm so tired. I stink. I'm gutted. I've been traveling for 48 hours before my actual travel. A lot of hurry up and wait.

Not to mention, in pursuing this full time (seriously I had to be on hold for 16 hours in the last two weeks)... I'm behind on packing up my house because I need to vacate my house and be without a place to live again.

The loneliness is most profound in these moments. I'm so so so fucking grateful for my self-reliance. I know it's something I need to break. But I wouldn't have been able to do this. I'm impressive. And? It's not sustainable. I was not built for this. I ache.

I find myself passing the endless hours just reliving being abandoned in the middle of the night. The benign neglect I was raised in.

That hug my best friend gave me? Only thing got me through.

"Sir" topples me. Any semblance of me having hope and believing I could get through this gets shafted when someone calls me sir. The he/hims is not great. But something about sir.

And I just get swept back up on my ex willfully misgendering me as some spectacle for her queer journey. After years and years of berating me about it.

But I have learned there are people out there who really do want to help. They're great. To anyone reading this for passport info: learn charm. I cannot emphasize this enough. It's fucked up. But it's vital.

I think the genre I'm living in is still some bitter sweet indie. I would love to say this is some comedy, but it's unreasonable to assume we know what genre we're living in.

Anyways. The last thing I learned is that I'm ready for the Amazing Race and I'm going to win.

Also I'll be out of the country. Tag me in the gold stuff

My queue said it was 12 posts but that was a lie. I have it set up for y'all. You're good.

#amazing race

[aestheticvoyage2023]

Day 26: Thursday January 26, 2023 - “Atomic Habits”

The Author of Book #2 of 2023 I found while listening to the podcast of the guy who wrote book #1 of the year (Lewis Howes) - one of those where you go buy the book of the guy before the episode is even over and while Ive had other books queued up longer, this just makes good sense as I fly home to Tucson ready to get geared up for a healthy year, with nothing ahead of me now but my own will to either do it or not.   Though Atomic Habits would help me lay a good foundation, or system for getting my goals all achieved.   After the first 50 pages, I had jived with so much that it felt like I was ear-wigging every page to come back to later.  One thing I love about this book so far though - chapter summary at the end of each chapter...because there is some heavy hitting rocket fuel stuff in here so far.   I committed, as I downed my second cup of coffee out over some western skyline somewhere between Portland and Tucson, that once I was all done with this book (hopefully soon) I would circle back and read each of the summaries again.    And here is how you know its a good one to wind up here - several people commented on it at the airport about it being good or them wanting to read it.   Some good mojo in this one, and I am glad I left the cover on, to invite that conversation.

Song: Frank Sinatra - Come Fly With Me

Quote:  “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

[usafphantom2]

Finland will order AIM 9X Block II missiles and JSOWs for its F-35 jets

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 11/30/2022 - 14:04 in Armaments, Military

Finland may soon place an order for tactical missiles AIM 9X Block II and AGM-154 Joint Stand Off Weapons (JSOW) for almost $325 million to arm its fleet of F-35 jets.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) today delivered the required certification, notifying the U.S. Congress about this possible sale.

Finland requested the purchase of 40 tactical missiles AIM 9X Block II; 4 tactical guidance units AIM 9X Block II; and 48 AGM-154 Joint Stand Off Weapons (JSOW). Also included are Dummy Air Training Missiles (DATM); Captive Air Training Missile (CATM); Captive Flight Vehicles (CFVs); Free Flight Vehicles (FFVs); and related equipment and support. The total estimated cost is US$ 323.3 million.

U.S. Navy F-35C fighter releasing a JSOW during tests in the U.S.

The proposed sale will improve Finland's air-to-air and air-surface weapons capabilities and will have a positive impact on U.S. relations with the countries of the Nordic region.

In December 2021, Finland announced that it had chosen to buy 64 F-35 jets to replace the current F/A-18 Hornets fleet. The first F-35s will arrive at Rovaniemi Air Base in 2026 and all 64, including those that will be based further south of Finland, will be in operation by 2030.

The main contractor of this possible purchase will be Raytheon Missiles and Defense, from Tucson, Arizona.

Tags: AIM-9X SidewinderarmamentsMilitary AviationF-35 Lightning IIIlmavoimat/Fenthean Air ForceJSOWRaytheon

Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. It has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[robinwillispllc]

Finding a home in Tucson can be challenging without real estate agent assistance. Whether you're buying or selling, a suitable local real estate agent in Tucson like Robin Willis will guide you through the best bargain possible deal. Call now and allow Robin Willis to assist you with your property.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!

You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush

The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html

Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech

Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.

Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.

But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.

Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.

But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/

Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:

https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests

Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.

If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/

Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.

There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.

But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.

Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.

That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.

But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.

As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #disinformation #algorithmic bias #elections #election disinformation #conspiratorialism #paternalism #this machine kills #Horizon #the rents too damned high #weaponized shelter #predictive policing #fr #facial recognition #labor #union busting #union avoidance #standardized testing #hiring #employment #remote invigilation

[lewisibarra1512]

Around my trip to Tucson, I had the pleasure of buying an Amazon card for me to avoid getting blocked by the team using a pre-paid alternative, then went for online shopping on a Saturday afternoon in a hotel. Two and a half days later as I came home, I was greeted with three things:

Aoub Protective Case for iPad Pro (12.9 2021 model)

Elago Apple Pencil 2 case

doeboe AirTag Wallet

However, as for the latter, I won't be able to use it until I get my own AirTag using the Apple Store app that can be found on iOS devices. That way, I won't have any problems losing my ID again.

Just because I'm on a roll for summer vacation, that doesn't at all mean I'd stop shopping. We're just getting started!

#blog #Amazon #Amazon haul #iPad Pro #Apple Pencil

[tucsonrealtorz]

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Tucson’s real estate market offers a diverse range of properties, from luxurious estates to affordable family homes, making it a favorable location for many aspiring homeowners and investors. The allure of Tucson’s real estate is bolstered by its picturesque landscapes, rich cultural heritage, and a robust economy that continues to attract residents from all over the country.

Finding Your Dream Tucson House for Sale

For those in search of houses for sale in Tucson, the market is ripe with opportunities. Whether you’re looking for a cozy suburban home or a sprawling desert estate, Tucson’s diverse neighborhoods cater to a wide range of preferences and budgets. Key areas to consider include the historic districts that boast charming vintage homes, as well as the newer developments that offer modern amenities and sustainable living options.

Partnering with the Best Realtor in Tucson

Selecting the right Tucson realtor is crucial when navigating the local real estate market. A skilled real estate agent can provide invaluable insights into the Tucson housing scene, tailor searches to meet specific needs, and negotiate the best deals. When searching for the "best realtor in Tucson" or a "realtor near me," consider their local expertise, experience, and client reviews to ensure they are well-equipped to assist you, whether buying or selling.

Selling Your House in Tucson

For those looking to sell house in Tucson, the market conditions are generally favorable, but success often depends on strategic planning and effective marketing. Tucson real estate agents play a pivotal role in this process, employing their knowledge of the local market to set competitive prices, stage homes appealingly, and reach potential buyers through various channels.

Omni Homes Tucson: A Leader in Real Estate

Omni Homes International stands out as a premier firm in Tucson’s real estate sector. Known for their comprehensive service and expert team of agents, Omni Homes Tucson provides tailored assistance to both buyers and sellers. They leverage advanced technology and extensive networks to ensure smooth transactions and satisfactory outcomes for their clients.

The Role of a Tucson Real Estate Agent

A Tucson real estate agent is more than just a facilitator of buying and selling. They are advisors, market analysts, and negotiators who wear many hats in the course of a transaction. They assess market trends, advise on the timing of a sale or purchase, and ensure that all legalities are handled correctly, providing peace of mind for both parties involved.

Why Choose a Realtor Near Me?

When looking for real estate services, proximity can be a significant advantage. Choosing a “realtor near me” ensures that you work with someone who is readily available and deeply familiar with the local community and its real estate dynamics. This local expertise is invaluable when trying to find a home that meets all your criteria or when positioning a property attractively in the market.

Conclusion

The Tucson real estate market presents ample opportunities for buyers and sellers alike. Whether you’re exploring Tucson houses for sale, considering selling your property, or simply seeking the best real estate advice in the area, partnering with a knowledgeable Tucson realtor is essential. Companies like Omni Homes International exemplify the high standard of service required to navigate this dynamic market effectively.

In conclusion, whether you are drawn to the charm of old Tucson or the innovation of new developments, the Tucson real estate market is equipped to meet your needs. With the guidance of experienced professionals, you can embark on your real estate journey with confidence, making informed decisions that lead to successful real estate transactions in this beautiful desert city.

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Day 97: Sunday April 7, 2024 - "Silver Appreciation Post"

It was a romantic end of trail for Silver and I's run through the universe these past few days. I wasn't feeling the love and loyalty trying to buy a new Toyota hybrid, and one final interaction out on the back lot, provided the omen I needed to pick up and move on from it. As if Silver was saying to get on up outta here. I tipped my hat to Silver on the way out the door, and handed over its title to the foreman in the service shop there. He said he planned to fix it up and keep it for himself and get it back on the road where it belongs. I was so grateful for that. After such a wonderful story together where I got more out of it than I could have ever dreamed, now it winds up in a place to get a new life. Its a bell cow now - with every opportunity to get at least to 300,000 miles. I proudly shared with Toyota, how my Prius has been a legend. From every corner of the country, and every new road we could find.

Its easy to be nostalgic about it - it gave me far more than I could have ever dreamed when my Dad found back in the fall of 2013. After an overnight test drive, and some arm twisting from my Dad, I was indeed getting my wide frame behind the wheel of a Prius. It was - slowly - life changing. Delayed by a deer strike, but on course for fate, I tied a seakayak to the rack in a snow storm and set out on my Grand walkabout. We went west. Me and my Silver steed. And indeed the sun did shine soft on another face - we found our home. We crossed this country in search of bread and love. And found all of it. It was the car that will always be most tied to my identity than any other vehicle. We did big things together - I saw the universe through its mirrors and filters. It took good care of me - always reliable. The car I brought William home from the hospital in is the same special car I rolled out on my walk about in. I'll never forget that. Daddy's car will always first and foremost have been Silver. My special car. I drove it for as long as I could, and when it gave up its ghost in February it didn't owe us a thing. Paid off since 2018 we got 6 more years of good go out of our main car for almost no cost. My Dad agrees, its definitely one of the best used car picks he's ever hit on. Yea, couldnt hardly have been any better. We bought it at 40k miles from a dealer in Lansing, MI. I sold it for cash to a service foreperson in Tucson. And in between we saw some the neatest and very best roads. From Yosemite to the Everglades. From Big Bend of Texas, to Big Sur in California. Places it shouldn't have gone, admitted issues with its headlights, and horn, and yes that might be some white gorilla tape holding that panel together - got that in Tahoe on Labor Day one year. All scars are memorable on this car. This scratch here is from my kayak in the everglades when I still very new in learning how to strap it down, in the first leg of the ramble. And these big scratches here on the front bumper are from the time the car completely shutdown and we couldn't get it up out of the alley and into our backyard, no matter. how. hard. we. tried. It just wouldnt fit - those scars, remind me of that - when the engine and everything was all rebuilt as part of a recall to save the day for us. It always felt like I was spoiled with this car. It was a legend in the way it was steady for me. I had to be convinced by my Dad at first, but I'll always give him all the credit - and especially after we added that sport rack, it was ready to be my adventure-mate. I sang its praises. It had so much room I could live out of it, as I went state to state, literally carrying a dinner table to serve as my mobile remote office. I'd pull it out and setup shop in each new place I'd land in. That Prius, thought of as a little car, had more room than most little SUVs. I was proud of it - and the story we were telling together, seeing the country, giving others the permission to do it, in a way that I never had. I'd like to think that somehow I made a difference, out there in my white Prius.

Some of the stickers, still on it today, were there from the beginning in October 2013. The 142 Into the Wild tag, the old english D. The Michigan Love. Later we'd pick up a Bernie Sticker in Vermont, and of course a Biden sticker - which shouldnt surprise people to see on a Prius in Tucson, though it always seemed to surprise them when they saw me behind the wheel - not what they expected! And I love that. -that maybe we reshaped some ideas around going smaller and more sustainably in the effort to simplify and enjoy the expeirence. It was the perfect car. For all of that. And for me and for that time. It helped light the spark. It was part of the manifestation, that led me here. To my fate, and my family. It has a spark of that. Its easy to be romantic about the connection to such an inanimate thing - a machine - a computer. I gave it a loving goodbye and loving place to land. I'd done my part, and ended that story.

Id spend the day writing reviews in its honor, and researching Subarus before working to settle on a new family car, the Ascent. By week's end we'd have our names on one in transit and figuring out financing. A new story starting in a more exciting and energized way that feels very right. Just had to close that last circle first. I'll be a very lucky man, if I ever have a better car than Silver - I just can't imagine it will ever be possible to catch that magic twice. The car I left in, found love in, brought my son home in. It gave me everything.

Song: Josh Ritter - Roll On

Quote: “I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.” ― Johannes Kepler

Not ALL of these miles were in Silver, of course - some pre-dated the Prius, and some tracks were in rentals. BUT Oh, So, many of these tracks were in the Prius at some point.

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Are you looking for real estate’s agency in Arizona?

Are you in the market for a new home or property in the picturesque state of Arizona? Whether you're a first-time homebuyer, an investor seeking lucrative opportunities, or a homeowner looking to sell, finding the right real estate agency is crucial to ensuring a smooth and successful transaction. Arizona, known for its stunning landscapes, diverse communities, and vibrant cities, offers a wealth of real estate options, making the choice of a reliable and experienced agency even more critical.

In your quest for a real estate agency in Arizona, it's essential to consider key factors that distinguish the best from the rest. A reputable agency should possess a deep understanding of the local market, have a proven track record of successful transactions, and prioritize client satisfaction. As you embark on this journey, keep an eye out for an agency that aligns with your specific needs and goals.

One of the first aspects to consider when searching for a real estate agency in Arizona is its knowledge of the local market trends. Arizona's real estate landscape is diverse, ranging from urban centers like Phoenix and Tucson to more rural areas with unique charm. An agency with a finger on the pulse of these market dynamics can provide valuable insights into current property values, emerging neighborhoods, and potential investment hotspots. This local expertise is crucial for making informed decisions that align with your preferences and financial objectives.

Experience is another key factor that sets a real estate agency apart. Look for agencies with a solid track record of successful transactions, especially in the type of property you are interested in. Whether it's residential homes, commercial properties, or vacant land, an experienced agency is better equipped to navigate the complexities of the Arizona real estate market. Additionally, seasoned professionals often have established networks and connections that can be leveraged to your advantage during negotiations and transactions.

Client satisfaction should be a top priority for any reputable real estate agency. Consider researching client testimonials, reviews, and referrals to gauge the level of satisfaction previous clients have experienced. A satisfied client base is a testament to an agency's commitment to delivering exceptional service, transparent communication, and successful outcomes. Reading about others' experiences can provide valuable insights into the agency's strengths and how well they align with your expectations.

In your search, look for an agency that offers a comprehensive suite of services to meet your specific needs. Whether you're buying, selling, or investing, a full-service agency can streamline the process and provide a one-stop solution for all your real estate requirements. This includes assistance with property valuation, marketing, negotiations, and legal aspects, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience from start to finish.

Technology and innovation have become integral components of the modern real estate landscape. A forward-thinking agency should leverage the latest tools and platforms to enhance the buying or selling experience. This may include virtual tours, online marketing strategies, and advanced data analytics to stay ahead of market trends. Choosing an agency that embraces technological advancements demonstrates a commitment to providing clients with a contemporary and effective real estate experience.

As you embark on your search for a real estate agency in Arizona, take the time to meet with potential candidates, ask questions, and assess their suitability for your unique needs. A trustworthy agency will prioritize your goals, provide personalized attention, and guide you through every step of the real estate journey. With the right agency by your side, you can confidently navigate the Arizona real estate market and turn your property dreams into reality.

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