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Cairn Horn88

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47 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I read somewhere that 1 percent of doctors generate something like 1/3 of all malpractice claims, but Im probably naive to think that data could tell us anything.

So what exactly do you think that data tells you? It tells me that the bad doctors get held to account. That's quite different than saying all doctors subject to lawsuits are bad doctors. It's also kind of weird to blame doctors for lobbying in their interests while it was ultimately the legislature that had to enact that rule. 

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I read somewhere that 1 percent of doctors generate something like 1/3 of all malpractice claims, but Im probably naive to think that data could tell us anything.

I’ll suggest to you that the ratio of “bad lawyers” is probably quite similar, maybe lower. I know literally hundreds of lawyers. Most are really good people, some are not so great, but nobody I know has committed the kind of malfeasance we’re talking about here. Which is not to say that it doesn’t occur (again, see the examples discussed in this very thread). I’m just suggesting to you they the percentage of “criminally bad lawyers” is probably pretty close to the percentage of “criminally bad” members of most any other profession.
And yes, even one is one too many, and our profession can and should police itself better. But I’ll also suggest that we notice really bad lawyers more because they’re involved in stories that are among the biggest of their time (the coverage of botched surgeries is nowhere close to the coverage of an attempted overthrow of the government….which makes sense).
Back to Eastman, Powell, and Chesebro….hang ‘em.
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46 minutes ago, SilasCoade said:

So what exactly do you think that data tells you?

I don’t want to derail the thread, but I would refer to to this study and others like it to draw conclusions from. 
 

 

44 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

But I’ll also suggest that we notice really bad lawyers more because they’re involved in stories that are among the biggest of their time (the coverage of botched surgeries is nowhere close to the coverage of an attempted overthrow of the government….which makes sense)

Agree on all counts above and we should get this back on track, but to be clear:

1) we can argue about whether other, less prestigious professions with much lower barriers to entry outside of law and medicine hold bad actors to account more aggressively. I would argue many do, but 

2) whether they do or not, the stakes are far higher with law and medicine most of the time, and for that reason it is imperative that legal and medical professions hold themselves to an extremely high standard. 

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One difference between law, medicine, and many other professions is the requirement for licensing.  An engineer can take the PE exam, but is not required to from a legal perspective.  One can handle bookkeeping duties for certain clients without being a CPA.  One can design a house without being a licensed architect.

In that sense, law and medicine are better at self-policing than other careers.  Obviously, some bad actors slip through the cracks now and again.

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7 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

In the early '00s my company hired several execs from GE who'd suckled at the teat of Jack Welch. Their number one phrase which we heard time and time again during reorgs, lay-offs, plant shutterings, etc. was "remember: it's not personal, it's just business." May all JW acolytes be tied to a fire ant mound naked with a gallon of Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce poured all over them.

 

I work in rotating equipment, GE has littered this industry with damn shitty execs an directors

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6 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

To. The fucking. Letter.

It was astounding. And after allowing the appropriate 3.5 seconds of quiet respect for those who were being shoved out of the door, it was immediately on to the next message of how the organization was now much more appropriately aligned for growth AND driving shareholder value which is the one and only true measurement of how successful a company is. Fuck 'em all.

2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

I work in rotating equipment, GE has littered this industry with damn shitty execs an directors

I worked at a large tech company that implemented that stack ranking bullshit that Welch was responsible for.   Once we had a team that we were happy with, our management literally brought people in that everybody knew were just there to fill a seat until employees were rated/ranked, and they were basically there until they were rotated out/let go and somebody else brought in to do the same thing.  

We saw other groups that were shit because either they were brown-nosing like crazy to remain close to their bosses, or they were back-stabbing each other to make each other look bad when evaluations came around.

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55 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I worked at a large tech company that implemented that stack ranking bullshit that Welch was responsible for.

Was that the "rank all your peers on a bell curve from worst to first?"  We had to do that . . . once.  We managed to get that VP fired because he was such a dipshit.  The idea that 20% of a team should be fired every year is insane.

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5 hours ago, Brisketexan said:


I’ll suggest to you that the ratio of “bad lawyers” is probably quite similar, maybe lower. I know literally hundreds of lawyers. Most are really good people, some are not so great, but nobody I know has committed the kind of malfeasance we’re talking about here. Which is not to say that it doesn’t occur (again, see the examples discussed in this very thread). I’m just suggesting to you they the percentage of “criminally bad lawyers” is probably pretty close to the percentage of “criminally bad” members of most any other profession.
And yes, even one is one too many, and our profession can and should police itself better. But I’ll also suggest that we notice really bad lawyers more because they’re involved in stories that are among the biggest of their time (the coverage of botched surgeries is nowhere close to the coverage of an attempted overthrow of the government….which makes sense).
Back to Eastman, Powell, and Chesebro….hang ‘em.

I was going to disagree with you a bit.  I do agree that most are just folks, trying to get by.  Some are really tremendous people with incredible work ethics, both for their jobs and community-service type endeavors.  A fair number of them are pretty dang sharp, but not all.

Where my argument fell apart though, was when I discovered that there are now nearly 110k lawyers in Texas.  Holy chit.  AFAIK, that's roughly double what it was when we were licensed.  I knew it had grown but not that much.

Just going by the dozen or so disciplined in the Bar Journal every month, that yields fewer than 0.2% of lawyers disciplined, and a fair number of those just did something dumb (like a lot of criminal types), or were suffering mental health issues (both deserving of discipline, but also second chances, imo), rather than severely bad acts.

Even the bad actors I have known or know of that have mostly escaped the lash of the bar or the criminal justice system probably don't raise that number to 1%, even though we know many escape discipline or other sanction.

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2 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

I was going to disagree with you a bit.  I do agree that most are just folks, trying to get by.  Some are really tremendous people with incredible work ethics, both for their jobs and community-service type endeavors.  A fair number of them are pretty dang sharp, but not all.

Where my argument fell apart though, was when I discovered that there are now nearly 110k lawyers in Texas.  Holy chit.  AFAIK, that's roughly double what it was when we were licensed.  I knew it had grown but not that much.

Just going by the dozen or so disciplined in the Bar Journal every month, that yields fewer than 0.2% of lawyers disciplined, and a fair number of those just did something dumb (like a lot of criminal types), or were suffering mental health issues (both deserving of discipline, but also second chances, imo), rather than severely bad acts.

Even the bad actors I have known or know of that have mostly escaped the lash of the bar or the criminal justice system probably don't raise that number to 1%, even though we know many escape discipline or other sanction.

So Shakespeare was right?

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2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

Ricky Gervais Lol GIF

 

2 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

 

The mental gymnastics in the first one. "They should have known there was no case" and, "They didn't break any laws". Buuuuut, they all took a plea deal? Because they didn't break any laws? So, they, again, took a plea deal? Make it make sense.

And the second  X, formerly known as Twitter, clip, as I was reading through the comments it reminded me of Kelly Anne or however the fuck you spell it (she doesn't deserve to have it spelt correctly), what happened to her after breaking her relationship with her own fucking kid??? Is she dead? Please, tell me she is dead. Not the kid but Cuntyann.

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22 minutes ago, coachherman'sgrill said:

The mental gymnastics in the first one. "They should have known there was no case" and, "They didn't break any laws". Buuuuut, they all took a plea deal? Because they didn't break any laws? So, they, again, took a plea deal? Make it make sense.

Because the deep state or something 

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1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

Was that the "rank all your peers on a bell curve from worst to first?"  We had to do that . . . once.  We managed to get that VP fired because he was such a dipshit.  The idea that 20% of a team should be fired every year is insane.

Manager did the ranking. It was the worst office politics that I've ever seen. It was fucking stupid, because it caused a lot of tension and drama where there didn't need to be any.  Some managers would hire people that they know they would be dinging on their annual performance review, because they knew they had to get rid of somebody, so on those teams, there were members of the team that nobody cared about.  

What's worse is that if a manager put together a really solid team, you didn't have a team of 10 people who were working together towards a mutual goal that would benefit the company, you had a team of 10 people who saw each other as competitors, and in that environment, if somebody feels they will be put on a performance improvement plan or even lose their job if their teammates look better than them, then maybe they don't share duties or information that would help out teammates so that the teammates look bad. 

It was really fucking stupid, because you would have conversations with your manager about objectives/goals over the coming year  and the actions you needed to do to meet those goals, which is great if you work at another company on an assembly line or in a job that was easy to quantify and doesn't change throughout the year.  But if you were in a development group, or a customer service/engagement group or whatever, your job will change throughout the year, which means that at your annual performance review, you're having to talk about shit that happened 6 months ago, and anything that deviated from the annual objectives you laid out the previous year wasn't discussed and/or didn't benefit you (and if you went above and beyond your goals, that didn't matter).  You were rated on a scale of one to four on goals that were laid out a year ago, and not things that had changed since that time, and if you were not in a senior role, you were already dinged.  And you couldn't change your objectives/goals as you went along and your job changed, even if your first-line manager was the one changing your job - he or she would still evaluate you based on the goals from the previous review.

Everything you did came down to basically one single number.   It caused a lot of good people to leave because they didn't want to deal with the drama of competing with one another in addition to their regular job, or having to worry that their responsibilities changed throughout the year, but the annual review only cared about the goals laid out in the previous review.

 

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Was that the "rank all your peers on a bell curve from worst to first?"  We had to do that . . . once.  We managed to get that VP fired because he was such a dipshit.  The idea that 20% of a team should be fired every year is insane.

Yes that was the Jack Welch thing. Clearly you aren’t six sigma.

Oh btw, go look at GE’s historical market cap. I think about 80% of it has vaporized since the Jack Welch days. Nice legacy there bud.
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One thing you can’t deny, fuckstick has taken the insult to a whole new master level I had no idea even existed.

Or course, any normal adult wouldn’t tolerate this rhetoric from a 4th grader for 30 seconds. But hey, MAGA!!!!

And oh yea, just grab ‘em by the pussy!!
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1 hour ago, Gil Bang said:

Yet, that fat cunt Barr will still vote from Trump, "if he's the nominee", to save the world from the socialist policies of Joe Biden.

 

Fuck that guy.  I hope he dies in a fire. 

Anyone that subscribes to the unitary executive theory should be banished to Kalaupapa Peninsula.  

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3 hours ago, Satchel said:

I remember when many of us worried that Trump’s election would normalize him and all of the bad things that come with him.  Well, it happened.

I was going to quote that tweet because I'm still able to be amazed that such a rant comes from a serious person let alone a leading candidate for president. I'm not amazed that he writes this shit. I still get dejected by how normal it has become.

I notice there are only a few thousand likes for Trump's tweet. I wonder how many people are reading them. They're not showing up outside courthouses to support the fuckwad. Maybe they don't read this stuff either. They've made up their minds and don't need to read or pay attention. 

A large plurality of the electorate supports Donald Trump to be president. 

Speechless.

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7 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I notice there are only a few thousand likes for Trump's tweet. I wonder how many people are reading them. They're not showing up outside courthouses to support the fuckwad. Maybe they don't read this stuff either. They've made up their minds and don't need to read or pay attention. 

This is probably very true.  A ton of his voters know he's noxious and would rather not pay attention to his rants.  The just know they HAVE to vote against that commie liberal devil Biden.  It's purely a team sport to a lot of them.

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7 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I notice there are only a few thousand likes for Trump's tweet. I wonder how many people are reading them. They're not showing up outside courthouses to support the fuckwad. Maybe they don't read this stuff either. They've made up their minds and don't need to read or pay attention. 

I honestly don't think it's a lot of people either, or the Jan 6 convictions and jail sentences/felonies have made a lot of people pause, or they think he's useless if he's not in the WH, or they amount of legal shit Trump is in has made some of them realize that he's a piece of shit, or a combination of all of the above.

The Truth Social devs could easily add a zero to Trump's stats on the platform and none of us would know any better, but the fact that his stuff has a fraction of what it had on twitter says quite a bit (not to mention the amount of bots on twitter vs Truth Social). I think Trump actually knows this, and while I could be giving him way too much credit, he's a reality TV star (and arguably always has been, at least in mindset), plus he knows there aren't crowds of supporters hanging out when he's making his courtroom appearances.  We've also seen him bitter at Fox News, and he knows that a lot of the MAGA types are probably not seeing him outside of what Fox News says. Hell, his impromptu press conferences are probably a result of him wanting to get in on the news cycle and control some of the narrative.

I've also talked to MAGA relatives/acquaintances, or seen their Facebook comments, who appear oblivious to what he is saying on Truthsocial, and they act surprised at the gag order stuff and don't understand "why he's being muzzled for nothing".  Now they could be playing dumb and could be devouring everything he says on there (or it's reposts on other platforms), but if they are deliberately pretending like they aren't seeing it, then that shows an awareness that they at least know how shitty/cringeworthy what he's saying is.

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39 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

This is probably very true.  A ton of his voters know he's noxious and would rather not pay attention to his rants.  The just know they HAVE to vote against that commie liberal devil Biden.  It's purely a team sport to a lot of them.

I mean, at some point don't you just say "Godalmighty this guy is a whiny bitch."

I have heard the notion that he is incredibly "put upon" by his enemies and the deep state, etc.  And if I squint, I can see that.  

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8 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

A large plurality of the electorate supports Donald Trump to be president. 

False. Donald Trump has never won a popular vote. In a two candidate race a plurality cannot exist except when also being an outright majority (considering only active voters not eligible voters who may not have participated).

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8 minutes ago, SilasCoade said:

False. Donald Trump has never won a popular vote. In a two candidate race a plurality cannot exist except when also being an outright majority (considering only active voters not eligible voters who may not have participated).

Not false:

image.png.5aeb55351856e1b4f29f3a4fd93f1388.png

 

In common usage, plurality means less than a majority. I don't think calling more than a quarter of the electorate a plurality is, as you blurt, false.

I'd be glad if others weighed in on this. If I am indeed using the word incorrectly, I'd like to cease doing so. 

Edited by RomaVicta
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Just now, RomaVicta said:

Not false:

image.png.5aeb55351856e1b4f29f3a4fd93f1388.png

 

In common usage, plurality means less than a majority. I don't think calling more than a quarter of the electorate a plurality is, as you blurt, false.

I'd be glad if others weighed in on this. If I am indeed using the word incorrectly, I'd like to cease doing so. 

Yes, it means less than a majority but still more than anyone else. That has never been the case for this tub of goo.

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12 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

Yet, that fat cunt Barr will still vote from Trump, "if he's the nominee", to save the world from the socialist policies of Joe Biden.

 

Fuck that guy.  I hope he dies in a fire. 

a fire fueled by his own blubbery whale oil.

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20 minutes ago, SilasCoade said:

Yes, it means less than a majority but still more than anyone else. That has never been the case for this tub of goo.

If I'm using plurality wrong, which I'm still not convinced that I am, thanks for calling it out. I still think I'm supported by common usage. I see in the definition that the word is inappropriate outside of an election where the winner has the plurality. The first definition pulls the meaning to a slightly more general meaning, but you're techinically correct.

If it turns out I'm using if fine, I use it to connote a large portion less than half in the context of the body of voters, I do appreciate the discussion. I'm sure everybody else is rapt as well.

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