> In a 2016 interview with PEOPLE, Nick spoke about his years-long struggle with drug addiction, which began in his early teens and eventually left him living on the streets. He said he cycled in and out of rehab beginning around age 15, but as his addiction escalated, he drifted farther from home and spent significant stretches homeless in multiple states.
Rob Reiner directed a movie from a semi-autobiographical script his son co-wrote a few years ago. Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this.
(tangent) for those of us who had close experiences with addiction in our families, it's so obvious why "give them money" or "give them homes to live in" isn't a solution to homelesness. A close family member owned 3 properties and still was living in the streets by choice because of his addiction which evolved into a full blown paranoid schizophrenia. He almost lost it all but he was forcefully commited into a mental institution and rehab saved his life.
Just realize your personal experience isn't generalizable. Surveys I've seen report that about a third of homeless have drug problems, which means that the other two thirds may very well benefit from "give them homes to live in".
UCSF published a comprehensive study of homelessness in California in 2023 [1]. A few relevant points:
The ~1/3 substance use figure holds up (31% regular meth use, 24% report current substance-related problems). But the study found roughly equal proportions whose drug use decreased, stayed the same, or increased during homelessness. Many explicitly reported using to cope with being homeless, not the reverse.
On whether money helps: 89% cited housing costs as the primary barrier to exiting homelessness. When asked what would have prevented homelessness, 90% said a Housing Choice Voucher, 82% said a one-time $5-10K payment. Median income in the 6 months before homelessness was $960/month.
The severe-mental-illness-plus-addiction cases like the family member mentioned exist in the data, but the study suggests they're the minority. 75% of participants lost housing in the same county they're now homeless in. 90% lost their last housing in California. These are mostly Californians who got priced out.
There is very good research to indicate that when housing costs a lot, versus geos where housing costs a little, homelessness clearly is lower. while this is not causation, the correlation is extremely clear. I think that Gregg Colburn, The University of Washington has done a good job arguing for this correlation and it's difficult to argue against it. What's nice about his research is it's not reliant on self-reported surveys to dig out these trends.
So, if somebody is inside of the house, we definitely want to try to keep them inside of the house. I also agree with your contention that when somebody hits the streets, they actually turn the drugs. And I believe the evidence points toward the ideas of this being a system That doesn't have a reverse gear on the car. If you keep somebody in the house, they won't go homeless. But if you give homeless a house or lodging, it doesn't return them back to the original function.
But one of the really interesting facts to me, which is in the study that you linked, but also in the other studies that I've red covering the same type of survey data, is almost never highlighted.
When you actually dig into the survey data, what you find out is that there is a radical problem with under employment. So let's do that math on the median monthly household income. I do understand it is a medium number, but it will give us a starting point to think about at least 50% of the individuals that are homeless.
Your study reports a median monthly household income of 960 dollars in the six months before homelessness. If that entire amount came from a single worker earning around the California statewide minimum wage at that time (about 14–15 dollars per hour in 2021–2022, ignoring higher local ordinances), that would correspond to roughly:
- 960 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 69 hours per month, or about 16 hours per week.
- 960 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 64 hours per month, or about 15 hours per week.
For leaseholders at 1,400 dollars per month, the same rough calculation gives:
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 100 hours per month ≈ 23 hours per week.
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 93 hours per month ≈ 21–22 hours per week.
We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.
Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue). This would appear to me to be an intuitive statement and possibly is simply created because you've already made up your mind. Unfortunately, after we make up our mind to do something, our brains are heavily subject to confirmation bias, which means it's incredibly difficult for people to take in new information or to consider new viewpoints. On the other hand, if you have good rational, logical rationale, then it should be able to be laid out fairly crisply.
However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.
In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.
As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.
> Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).
I already have in my prior comment:
>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
In other words, your logic is:
Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home
Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:
* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?
* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?
* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?
* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?
* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?
With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.
Okay I think I understand what happened. A couple posts ago you listed to an executive summary for CASPEH. I don't believe you've ever read the complete report, which is around 96 pages.
If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:
Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.
Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.
Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.
In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.
Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.
There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.
Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.
You may be confusing jameslk with me - I'm actually the one who linked the CASPEH exec summary. Your underemployment math is interesting, but I'd note the study also reports 34% have limitations in daily activities, 22% mobility limitations, 70% haven't worked 20+ hours weekly in 2+ years. When asked why, participants cited disability, age, transportation, and lack of housing itself as barriers. So the causation may be more circular than "fix jobs first" as the same factors driving underemployment are driving housing instability, and being unsheltered makes holding a job harder.
But thank you for actually some very insightful comments and actually digging into the details. And I do agree with your contention that there is some sort of circular system issue going on here (ala Jay Forrester out of MIT).
It is pretty interesting. While you reported everything perfectly, I'll just paste in the detailed section at the bottom as it does add a little more detail and really does give us something to think about. FDR in 1944 suggested that there should be a second bill of rights. In many ways I am attracted to his framework. In his second bill of rights, the very first one was "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation."
It strikes me that having gainful employment in which you feel like you are contributing in some method to a society is incredibly foundational to good mental health. I think FDR recognized this and I don't think he was thinking about communism. I think he was indicating that we need to find worth for individuals. Of course, with World War II and his health issues, the somehow seemed to go by the side.
This is not somebody telling somebody on the street to get a job. It's a question of how do we enable people to get a job? And I believe if there is an opportunity for the government to spend tax dollars, it may be in incentivizing employers to take these individuals and be creative in how they employ them for direct benefits. It's hard for me to imagine that there isn't some economic way of incentivizing business to show entrepreneurship if we incentivize them correctly.
This doesn't mean that you don't figure out how to solve housing. It simply means that we think about things systemically.
"Participants noted substantial disconnection from labor markets, but many were looking for work.
Some of the disconnection may have been related to the lack of job opportunities during the pandemic, although participants did report that their age, disability, lack of transportation, and lack of housing interfered with their ability to work. Only 18% reported income from jobs (8% reported any income from formal employment and 11% from informal employment). Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly. Of all participants, 44% were looking for employment; among those younger than 62 and without a disability, 55% were."
The vast majority (that accepted accommodation) destroyed the spaces and eventually fled back to the streets. It is generally not productive to simply rehome all the homeless en mass. There are first order drug abuse and mental illness issues that cannot be ignored.
As with any survey or most research really, it’s the sample the determines the finding. Homelessness is not easy to define precisely. Drug addiction, setting aside the fact that surveys are self reported, is a bit more cut and dried but from your response it’s not clear if alcohol is included, or drug history. Like if someone did some bad shrooms or had a bad acid trip and wound up homeless would that person be in the 2/3rds?
> Just realize your personal experience isn't generalizable. Surveys I've seen report that about a third of homeless have drug problems, which means that the other two thirds may very well benefit from "give them homes to live in".
100 years ago people like Rob Reiner's drug addict son's dealer would probably have been hanging from a tree.
note: this is not commentary on drug legalization, just commentary that "community efforts" were more involved in addressing negative social externalities than they are now - for better or for worse.
Not likely at all, most likely the drugs wouldn't have even been illegal, but an addict would certainly have been housed and institutionalized. More than half of mental patients were alcoholics and addicts.
So you claim to know for certain that it virtually never happens that someone winds up homeless for financial reasons, like their rent got raised or they lost their job and couldn't find one that paid enough for the prevailing rents.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain how you determined this. Did you for instance survey homeless people in a number of US cities? Or perhaps you used some other method.
So far AFAIK this claim isn’t repeated by any reputable publishers. E.g. Associated Press and LA Times both published 2.5 hours after PEOPLE and did not make this claim.
Also, People is credible for this type of reporting. They're owned by a major company, IAC, and they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer. They likely just have sources that other news outlets don't.
>they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer
TIL that the 'National Enquirer' was the most reliable news source during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. According to a Harvard law professor who gave the media an overall failing grade, the 'Enquirer' was the only publication that thoroughly followed every rumor and talked to every witness. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6n1kz5/til_th...>
The Enquirer also broke the John Edwards (vice-presidential candidate) affair story well before mainstream media picked it up. That doesn't make up for the reckless and sometimes completely nutso stories they print, but it is a reminder that they aren't always wrong.
That’s going a little far, I think. The Enquirer was mentioned during jury selection and not for facts. When the defense wanted to leak a story, they went to the New Yorker.
> The Independent reported 10 minutes ago that LAPD is still claiming no person of interest in this case.
>
> Hard to know what’s real and what’s gossip.
I'm sorry, but it's People. I'm not a celeb gossip, but I don't recall them running bs headlines on this level. C'mon.
I've been following it on my own news app as well, just didn't share a link to it as I thought it might be a bit ghoulish to piggyback on an unspeakably tragic celebrity death for a bit of self-promotion.
Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source. People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
The LAPD "no person of interest" thing is also just standard procedure. Cops don't publicly name suspects until charges are filed. Totally normal that the official process is slower than journalism.
Worse, people take "fairly reliable mainstream news source makes mistake or publishes propaganda op-ed" as a pretext to jump to sources that are way, way less reliable but publish things they want to hear.
> Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source.
I don't read celebrity news, how should I know People's track record?
I don’t have a news app. That was a maybe too subtle bit of sarcasm aimed at the guy I was responding too who is apparently the creator of a news app called Particle, and who mentioned that he is following the news of these deaths on Particle without mentioning his connection to it.
Update: Looks like the parent post has been flagged. I thought that might happen (or the author might edit it) which is why I quoted the original.
> People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible. I don't think a brand has any inherent value and hasn't for many decades. The nytimes helped cheney launder fraudulent evidence for the invasion of iraq for chrissake.
Fwiw, maybe it is true. But reliable truth sailed a long time ago.
It's absolutely defamation if they have no or unreliable sources and something Reiner's son could sue over. They are a big enough publication to know the risks here.
They'll reveal those sources to a judge if it comes to it. They won't reveal them to the public because nobody wants to have their name attached to something like this.
It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
Meh. Information is often jumbled and wrong in the immediate aftermath of a newsworthy event, and it is tempting to accept tenuous claims which reinforce one's biases. Take the murder of Bob Lee, in which early reports were a bit off and convinced maaaaany people it was a street crime (confirming their biases about San Francsisco).
There's no real advantage to accepting PEOPLE's claim at this point. It's possibly wrong, and we'll probably know the truth in good time.
The Bob Lee comparison doesn't really hold up. The "random street crime" narrative there was driven primarily by right-wing tech executives on social media - Musk, Sacks, etc. - not by news outlets making factual claims. Fox amplified the SF crime angle but wasn't naming suspects (and I put Fox in it own category anyway, based on its track record).
Meanwhile, actual newsrooms did reasonable work: the SF Standard put nine reporters on it and ultimately broke the real story. Other local outlets pushed back on whether SF crime was as "horrific" as tech execs claimed.
Most importantly: speculating about the type of crime (random vs. targeted) isn't defamation. Naming a specific living person as a killer is. That's a categorically different level of legal exposure, which is why outlets don't do it unless they're confident in their sourcing. If this kind of reckless misattribution happened as often as people here seem to imply, defamation lawyers would be a lot busier and these outlets would be out of business.
That's still a terrible way of evaluating credibility, especially when a determination of defamation is not the same thing as a determination of truth.
> It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
I wouldn't have felt bad if it did turn out to be wrong, I certainly left room open for doubt. But what I know about media outlets is they aren't often willing to put themselves in positions where they could get sued into oblivion.
There are obvious exceptions, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Candice Owens, but I think those exceptions have a level of insanity that powers their ability to make wild accusations without evidence.
“They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible.”
Not if they want sources again in the future. Assuming they have credible sources, it will prove them correct in due course. The vast majority of people aren’t grading news outlets on a minute-by-minute basis like this: if they read in People first it was his son, and two weeks from now it’s his son, they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
And if People burned the sources who told them this, industry people would remember that, too.
> All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.
That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting. An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
And "wide variety of credibility"... what? Do you think major outlets just hire random people off the street and let them publish whatever? There are hiring standards, editors, and layers of review. The whole point of a professional newsroom is to ensure a baseline of credibility across the organization.
Seems like you've reverse-engineered the Substack model, where credibility really does rest with the individual writer, and mistakenly applied it to all of journalism. But that's not how legacy media works. The institution serves as a filter, which is exactly why it matters who's publishing.
> That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting.
This certainly a popular narrative, but... C'mon, there isn't a single publication in existence that is inherently trustworthy because of "institutional vetting". The journalist is the entity that can actually build trust, and that "institutional vetting" can only detract from it.
> An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
This is also another easy way of saying "capital regularly determines what headlines are considered credible". That is not the same thing as actual credibility. Have you never read Manufacturing Consent?
Granted, I don't know why capital would care in this case. But the idea that "institutional integrity" is anything but a liability is ridiculous.
I've read Manufacturing Consent more than once - it's one of my favorite books and Chomsky one of my favorite thinkers (really dismayed that he associated with Epstein but I digress). Anyway, you've got it backwards.
The propaganda model is explicitly not "capital determines what headlines are credible." Chomsky and Herman go out of their way to distinguish their structural critique from the crude conspiracy-theory version where owners call up editors and dictate coverage. That's the strawman critics use to dismiss them.
The five filters work through hiring practices, sourcing norms, resource allocation, advertising pressure, and ideological assumptions - not direct commands from capital. The bias is emergent and structural, not dictated. Chomsky makes this point repeatedly because he knows the "rich people control the news" framing is both wrong and easy to dismiss.
It's also not a general theory that institutional journalism can't accurately report facts. Chomsky cites mainstream sources constantly in his own work - he's not arguing the New York Times can't report that a building burned down.
Applying the propaganda model to whether People magazine can accurately report on a celebrity homicide is a stretch, to put it mildly. You've taken a sophisticated structural critique and flattened it into "all institutional journalism is fake, trust nothing."
Speaking of media, I found it really useless that before the names were published, the majority of news articles just said "78 and 68 year old persons found dead [RIP] at Rob Reiner's home", but I had to search for his and his wife's age to correlate that it's him and his wife. I think only 1 news article said, "authorities have not said the names, but those are the ages of Rob Reiner and his wife".
It's because they don't want to be wrong, while at the same time having to rush to publish because if they want clicks they need to be first. So they publish only what the cops initially tell them, even before they had time to inquire that the couple killed were indeed the residents.
That's a telltale sign of a news organization that doesn't have access to backroom sources.
I've always found it weird that the police cannot name them, but they can give out clues, even clues that are, to all intents and purposes, naming them.
Lol reminds me of that partially redacted document about the Titan submarine that imploded.
There was like "submarine expert number 2, name redacted" and in expert 2's testimony he said something like "you may recall from my film, Titanic, that..." and I mean it could be anyone or maybe is definitely James Cameron
That's not what was happening there. They weren't hiding the identity, it's that they had not positively identified the victims. The cops talked to journalists very fast.
They hadn't positively identified them, but they knew exactly how old they were?
It seems much more likely that they had identified them, but they hadn't gone through the full set of procedures (notifying family members, etc.) that are required before officially releasing names.
If that's the case, that's really just dumb side-skirting of compliance rules, how much difference does it make for a yet-notified family member to read "Persons aged [dad's age] and [mom's age] found dead at residence of [their last name]" compared to "Mr. and Mrs. [their last name] found dead."?
In any case, tragically, their daughter lived across the street and found them.
> Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this
Also worth considering that Rob Reiner might have played his part in the roots of Nick's troubles ... after all Rob was his father and the drug problems started when he was still a child.
Are you a parent? Do you understand the challenges of parenting that includes the fact that "controlling" your child is ultimately impossible?
Yes, you can be attentive and engaged, ensure they're mentored and guided, are given discipline and instruction, etc. But they're still autonomous units that are going to do what the fuck they want to do.
Of course there are cases of abuse that can damage a child but that should not be a base assumption in this case (his other children appear to be fine).
We are not well-served by treating addiction as simply a matter of will-power and "character".
This isn't to say that we don't all bear responsibility for our conduct as best we can, but sometimes it's way more than that. It's like accusing a schizophrenic of not trying hard enough to "be normal".
I'd forgotten what an unusually strong and culturally-resonant line of movies the man had without (I think) the popular acclaim you might associate with them, like a low-profile Spielberg.
I'm just commenting to mention The Sure Thing, a delightful and endearing romcom with John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga, with small parts by Anthony Edwards, Nicollette Sheridan, and Tim Robbins.
This is indeed a delightful film. I tend to forget that Nicollette Sheridan was the titular character. It’s unusual (but perhaps explains some of Reiner’s interest, I wonder) that this film has an identifiable, personified McGuffin.
Oh wow he did A Few Good Men, too? These comments are just crazy in how many influential movies he made to me, without me realizing they were by him. And how are you the first to mention AFGM? That's the best of the bunch!
His first seven films are the kind of good that most filmmakers would like to have throughout a career, not starting one. He was also a writer on The Smothers Brothers before his role on All in the Family. He was definitely one of the greats.
I remember a radio host in the 90's remarking about how ironic it was that three of the biggest movie directors at the time were: Opie (Ron Howard), Laverne (Penny Marshall) and MeatHead (Rob Reiner).
It's definitely interesting seeing him physically morph from his younger days to today. When he first came on my radar as a director, I wondered if it was just another guy with the same name, I had to go look it up, and I was surprised. Seemed like a really great guy. :(
There’s a really good interview with Rob Reiner on Fresh Air, recorded as Spinal Tap 2 was being released a few months back. He talks all about the many movies he’s worked on as well as growing up in the household of a comedian. Well worth 45 minutes of your time:
Rest in peace. "The Princess Bride" is a really fun, unique and beautiful piece of art that my wife and I revisit all the time. Nobody deserves to go like this and he'll be missed.
It's a crowdsourced home-movie version produced by dozens of actors in the midst of pandemic lockdown, recording on their phones and using home made props. The actors rotate through the individual roles so you get a real range of performances. I found it delightful.
Worth checking out the opening scene to get a sense of it
I can't believe people voted me down for this! It's a direct quote from the movie, after Vizzini uses the word "inconceivable" you warthog-faced buffoons:
The book’s outstanding and different enough to be worth reading even (especially?) if you’ve seen the movie a hundred times.
It’s got a framing and woven-in narrative of the author stand-in tracking down this book his dad read him, discovering it was mostly awful, dry crap, and editing it down (and translating it) to a “the good parts” version like his dad read to him. The (kinda pathetic and melancholy) adult story going on is interesting to an adult reader, and… creates the opportunity to read the actual novel with a “the good parts” approach when reading it to a kid (this has to have been on purpose, it works great).
The author (William Goldman) was a screenwriter so the action scenes are snappy and great and the dialogue tight, but he also filled the book with jokes that only work in print, so you won’t just be getting a repeat of the movie on the humor side (though many of those jokes are in it, too).
Some sequences are greatly expanded and especially notable are large and effective back-story chapters for Fezzick and Inigo.
I really enjoyed Fezzick and Inigo's chapters. And the Zoo of Death! As I remember, the framing narrative was quite different, something about a screenwriter with some glaring personal issues IIRC. Worth reading if you love the movie, definitely.
Three great movies that he directed that everyone around my age would be relatively intimately familiar with: This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally
> Police are treating the deaths as apparent homicides. According to the L.A. Times, authorities have questioned a member of Reiner’s family in connection with the death. As of Sunday night, the LAPD have not officially identified a suspect, but Rolling Stone has confirmed that Reiner’s son, Nick, was involved in the homicide. A source confirmed to Rolling Stone that the couple’s daughter, Romy, found her parents’ bodies.
Alternative source:
> Senior law enforcement officials report that both had stab wounds
If you own the owners of media, you own all the journalists by virtue of the fact that to be a journalist requires someone to get a job as a journalist. In a place like the US you might have a handful of top people freelance and still be able to eat, but that is very rare.
You don't even need to go overseas. Just look at the NY Times and why they got the Iraq war so wrong or for even more egregious examples go and look at our wars before that. The fact that many of the high level positions on the news desk at the Times are filled by former employees of the US State department or intelligence agencies might give you a hint.
I've thought the same multiple times over the last few years. I can't remember all the events, but it was at least four separate times, most notably with January 6th. Every time it went like this:
1. Users on /r/conservative (& other conservative forums) show a surprisingly negative reaction to something done by the GOP
2. Over the next few days, their media starts repeating individual social media responses that seem to find agreement. They don't have to make sense, they just have to terminate the thought.
3. In the communities more and more voices spread those same responses while shouting down reasonable commenters from 1., declaring them "non-MAGA" or "RINOs"
4. After a few days/weeks, all opposing voices have been drowned out, and their moderation teams delete any posts that could sway their opinion/goes against the current.
- Misfolding & Conversion: A normal, functional prion protein (PrP C) changes shape into a misfolded, pathogenic form (PrP Sc), which acts as a template to convert more PrP C into PrP Sc.
- Self-Propagation: The core of prion dynamics is this autocatalytic cycle, where PrP Sc recruits and converts normal PrP C, leading to exponential growth.
Aggregation: These misfolded proteins clump together, forming large aggregates (amyloid) that deposit in the brain, causing neurodegeneration.
- Fragmentation: For propagation to continue, large aggregates must break down (fragment) into smaller pieces (seeds) that can initiate new conversion cycles, a process crucial for disease progression and influenced by chaperones like Hsp104 in yeast.
The group you are describing would indeed need to remove the misfolded protein for survival.
In terms of hope:
".... For propagation to continue, large aggregates must break down (fragment) into smaller pieces (seeds) that can initiate new conversion cycles"
In other words, the Republican party could be looking at serious fracturing into many many post-mango camps, ala Margerie Taylor Green leaving the MAGA camp. These dynamics are probably exactly how the conservatives got co-opted by the MAGA strain.
If you think about it, if you count 2015 campaign, Trump has been campaigning or in office for 10 years, with 3 more to go. That’s thirteen. fucking. years.
No man is that interesting. This person’s “opinion” on the world has just been utterly exhausting.
Literary trope? It’s not a trope, it Biblical. How many Kings in the Bible became afflicted with corruption and possession? It’s almost like God really wanted to make a point about great power.
No one else has mentioned it but among all his other great performances his hair-trigger angry dad in Wolf of Wall Street is hilarious.
I think being able to be both funny in his anger but also a bit intimidating and then go to being a warm father figure is something he would not have been able to portray without genuine charisma.
As an aside, it's been fascinating reading the comments here about news media.
People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters; never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.
I think there some jobs where community acknowledgment of "oh wow you do THAT job, thank you" can make up for lower pay. I think in states that have low teacher pay, for example, many think it's worth it so long as it comes with acknowledgment of the hard work and dedication -- which, of course, it often doesn't.
The counter-argument is probably that if it were truly acknowledged, then the pay itself would be higher. But I don't think it's the case that the average person in Florida thinks less of teachers than someone in New York. (I'm including cost of living adjustments in making this comparison btw.)
I don't disagree with the items you lay out, and maybe the ones you list are most important. But I do think "respect" belongs on the list, too.
"corporatism" - come on now. The reason why news was decent and the job was decent for a good amount of time was that newspapers were a natural monopoly. Fat, juicy profits and "owned" cities meant the owners could just say "I don't really care, just print approximately the truth and don't alienate readers across the broad spectrum that we have".... "oh, and I guess pay the journalists decently too, because I'm swimming in money"
What on earth are you talking about? Most major cities have had multiple papers in cutthroat competition with each other for decades. If the New York Times got a story wrong, the Wall Street Journal would happily take the opportunity to correct them and vice versa. In smaller cities with one big paper (like Baltimore with The Sun), the local tabloids (like The City Paper) would relish any opportunity to embarrass the paper of record if they got something wrong.
The era of monopolistic journalism is the new thing, not the old thing. The corporatism GP is referring to is conglomerates like Sinclair and Tribune Online Content (Tronc) buying up tons of local papers and broadcast stations and “cutting costs” by shutting down things like investigative reporting.
Major cities had more than one - the rest did not. The major cities had 2-3, so a duopoly. They all minted money for decades before the internet.
The local newspapers in question have terrible economics now because of the internet. The competition has come from the internet. Sinclair is dying, because they have bought a bunch of dying/dead assets. Tronc is the same. There was nothing to do here, the newspaper business as it worked previously is dead with a few exceptions.
The business is dead. The people involved aren't getting paid well, the owners are losing money, it's all bad when economics go bad.
Renting time on a printing press is not exorbitant.
Buying out local printing presses (and/or getting exclusivity in return for your business), is anticompetitive and sometimes illegal, but it's definitely not natural.
Newspapers tended to own presses. On top of that, the vast majority of their other costs were fixed costs. It's a natural monopoly, a stock standard example and the US government had to step in with the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970.
Colorado has had over 1,000 papers. The tactics of the largest paper during the mid 20th century included cries for attention that no dignified monopolist would try.
Pre-internet, "Colorado" wasn't a market. Dozens of markets existed in Colorado. If you don't understand that, it's fine, but stay out of the conversation.
Look up "newspaper joint operating agreements" and the "Newspaper Preservation Act". They were literally government sanctioned monopoly/duopoly structures from a business perspective to save newspapers from going to 1 paper towns. Ie, the government stepped in to help what was a process towards natural monopolies all over the country. The seattle times, the denver post were effectively monopolies via JOAs, and the san diego union tribune was a monopoly in its day (without a JOA). There are endless small city / large town examples.
You are clueless about newspapers in their heyday. It was like 60 years ago. No need to go around correcting people on a topic you know nothing about.
Because the vast majority of towns and small cities had 1 main newspaper. Bigger cities had 2 or 3. It was money as far as the eye could see for the owners.
A referee is a perfect analogy. We love to rate an umpire's call as "bad" after watching the slow motion replay 25 times, not based on the split second one-shot of information they had when they made it.
Yeah but sports aren't essential to society, and it really doesn't matter who wins, beyond fanning the flames of tribalism and religious proxy battles and advertising endorsements and gambling and hooliganism.
But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society.
Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them.
Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
If all you have to live for is sports, then you desperately need more education and better journalism and mental health care.
I'm not saying get rid of them, and I didn't mention art or music or exercise, which are far more useful and enriching than sports.
Just don't sacrifice much more important things for sports, like so many high schools and colleges and universities do.
Our society is NOT existentially suffering from a lack of referees, as much as a lack of good teachers and journalists.
Get your priorities straight. It really doesn't matter if your sportsball team wins or loses, but it does extremely matter if your children are educated and informed or not.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.
> Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
This is where journalistic reputation comes in. Do you trust the journalistic entity providing the story? Do they have a history of being correct? Has information from anonymous sources in other stories proven to be true?
Such stories are notable and egregious because they're rare. They definitely do happen -- the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access particularly bothers me. Perhaps a small number of such events are "too many", but they aren't common in reputable media.
> the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access
Judith Miller was not a politically neutral journalist trying to preserve access, she was a deeply, actively involved long-time Iraq hawk doing propaganda for her ideological faction.
I was involved in writing a history book of an organization, and we used what was termed "journalistic integrity."
We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).
The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.
Sure, but a lot of major news orgs publish things that are later found to be patently false or incorrect, so the onus is on the facts presented for me and many readers, the journalistic integrity angle is dead in my eyes.
At least since 2016 and beyond I've seen insanely verifiably false claims from mainstream media if you just look up raw sources. Starting with the Covington High Schoolers, within minutes of the story dropping I was able to validate that CNN a major news corporation was in fact lying, why?
Then there was a lot of shenanigans regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There was a headline from a letter written by Intelligence Officers that made it sound like the actually forensically valid laptop itself was faked Russian disinformation, but it turned out to be valid.
When it comes to politics every major news org fails misserably. Their inability to contain personal biases is astounding to me. I want raw facts if you're going to make political assertions or its just propaganda. I don't care which side is doing what, if they're doing wrong expose them all, but use facts and evidence, not just TMZ / tabloid level shenanigans. Everyone is behaving like teenagers whenever politics is brought up these days.
Well, that may be, but that's still on the news outlet.
We currently reward outlets that spew out junk, right off the bat, and penalize outlets that take the time to validate the data. Some outlets almost certainly make it up, on the spot. No downside.
Back in the 1990s/early 200s, Michael Ramirez (a political cartoonist) posted a comic, showing three pairs of shoes.
On the left, were a massive pair of battered brogue wingtips. Under them, was the caption "Cronkite."
In the middle, was a very small pair of oxfords; both left. Its caption was "Rather."
The right, was captioned "Couric," and featured a big pair of clown shoes.
As far as the anonymous sourcing goes, that has to do with the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible.
There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted
Fake sources (outside the gossip and celebrity columns and a couple of cheap tabloids in any given country) is essentially a non-issue even now.
“non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run.
It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source.
Bloomberg has come out with the linked story in 2021. They have never provided any other detail; no other journalist has been able to corroborate anything advanced in the story. Through grapevines, we've been able to ascertain that Bloomberg based the whole story on a single source that they massively misunderstood.
That story is the worst case scenario, and thank god, it's extremely rare to find such a blunder. Reading the comments here, you'd think half the reporting in the world is exactly as wrong as that one single thing.
And you’re never going to get all the angles from a single source. So short of paying a couple thousand dollars, and still getting ads, many people become cheap in exchange for the cheap experience pushed on them.
Are you sure that a lot of individuals hold those contradictory positions?
Or do the contradictions only exist across multiple persons?
(Tangent: anyone know if there's a term for this fallacy? I.e., claiming that an attribute exists for some/all of a group's members, when in fact that attribute only applies to the collective itself?)
Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout".
Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...
> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it.
'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
That's their problem. They're trying to give people what they want instead of being objective. They're supposed to be objective. What's that you say? Their objectivity is not rewarded? Well, neither is this.
Journalistic ethics speaks about impartiality, not objectivity, and that has always brought me comfort. I'm dismayed by young uns talking about a joke being objectively funny, or one movie in a series being objectively better than another. It is an Anti-literate trend.
Is this your cheeky and coy way of saying that objectivity is not possible? What's really the difference between impartiality and objectivity in this context? Sounds like you're just being a wordsmith.
Correct, objectivity is not possible. Human observation is never perfectly neutral.
What we call "objective" is usually just invisible judgment that aligns with our priors. An observer's choices about what to include, exclude, measure, or frame shape reality long before conclusions appear.
Scientific facts are just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
I want journalists to try to answer the 6 W's and make an effort to represent the stated positions of all parties mentioned. At least with that effort, you can have at least a chance at seeing what bias is in play. Most "journalism" fails on this metric by a wide margin.
That’s because the journalists of today that work for corporate outlets frame stories in ways that benefit power and police area agents of power, namely the business owners.
That's a function of time and technology, and our demands as consumers, not journalistic skill.
If a journalist has an entire day to gather facts and write the story before it's published in the newspaper the next day, it's going to be a lot more accurate than the realtime demands of "we are hearing reports of a bomb threat in the vicinity of..."
> People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
Not contradictory. People want information to be verified quickly. That's the job. The person who can do it the fastest gets the scoop. Publishing unverified stuff isn't doing the job faster, it's not doing the job. You can get away with cheating for a bit, as you can probably guess what's going to wind up getting verified most of the time, but that's all the more reason to punish cheaters when they eventually are caught.
And even then, publishing rumors and speculation are fine so long as they are clearly noted as such. It is only when unverified statements are treated as facts that there is a problem.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
You're not supposed to cite an anonymous source saying there are bodies buried; you're supposed to learn where the bodies are buried from the anonymous sources and then show the bodies as evidence. There is no need for an appeal to authority when you have proof. If a story relies on cited sources they should be named, and if no one is willing to go on the record then you shouldn't be relying on cited sources.
Also we should be pushing for strong whistleblower protections, especially reporting when whistleblowers are retaliated against.
> They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters
Who is asking for either raw data streams or that the news act as filters? People expect evidence (ie things that can be verified) and analysis (ie context for the evidence presented). Omitting unreliable evidence is fine, but people complain when the standard for reliable evidence changes without good reason.
> never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
If you publish actual facts, they will remain facts no matter what new facts emerge. Truth never contradicts truth, it only expands the story. It is perfectly fine to have incomplete facts, you better have a damn good reason if you have false facts.
> They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
No one wants neutrality, they want integrity. You can enthusiastically report that your side is right any day of the week so long as you're also willing to report when they're wrong. It's when evidence is chosen to fit the narrative rather than the narrative developed around the evidence that there's a problem.
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low.
Morale should be low in an industry driven to compromise it's standards and race to the bottom, and the worst offenders are the most highly rewarded. This should be an impetus for change.
Completely tragic. Rob Reiner's movies brought so much good into people's lives. The Princess Bride still remains a favorite. Today is a very sad and inconceivable end.
I had really high hopes but low expectations for Tap 2, just because it can be really tricky to follow up on a cult classic without totally stepping in it. I drove way out to see it on IMAX, and the entire family loved it.
Don't exactly know the difference in footage. I will say that I was on the fence about whether IMAX was a big deal for Spinal Tap 2, but afterwards we all felt like it was worth seeing in IMAX. Part of why I saw it in IMAX is that it was an early showing (IIRC the day before official release) and the IMAX theater 30 minutes away was the only option for seeing it that night.
The primary reason it shined in IMAX was the concert footage; It's giving "I'm on stage at a Tap concert".
RIP Rob Reiner. The Princess Bride is one of my all-time favorite movies. I have a theory (born out by experience) that most American-born software engineers can quote at least one line from TBL. I often use it as an opener with new hires.
Death can not stop true love. It can only delay it for a while.
I only knew him from directing Harry Met Sally and Wolf of Wall street where almost all of his scenes are hillarious, especially the one where he burst into the room abusing DiCaprio and his gang over expenses.
He directed The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, and Misery. Didn't know this, but he directed a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap.
Yes,I know BUT of his personal works, those two remain the only ones I have seen.
And also A Few Good Men (I did not know it was one of his works till now)
I'm not going to link to it, but the POTUS posted overnight about this, and even by the standards of that particular social media account, it was probably a new low. Someone in another forum I read regularly said of it "I'm going to show this to my kids to help teach them what the word sociopath means". It's not even the usual "politicizing a tragedy", just the complete inhumanity and self-centeredness on display. Look it up yourself if you want, but bring a bag.
To elaborate a bit for those who don't want to go read that sort of thing: Trump said Reiner was killed because he made people so angry by being opposed to Trump. There were a bunch of asides about Reiner's talent and mental state, and it closed with trying to brag about (fictional) administration accomplishments.
I don't take from it personality judgements, so much as it makes me want to look into how Reiner was trying to develop a series called 'The Spy and the Asset' on how Putin and Trump met and began working together.
That tracks for me, so Trump has personal reasons for behaving the way he does, though arguably self-preservation would induce him to not carry on the way he has done. But then he cannot be quiet about things he's guilty of, so I can't see his behavior as anything other than having a motive for just what's happened. I can't imagine he would take Rob's proposed series with equinamity: I'd love to know what Rob knew.
Definitely up there. "Misery" is one of the best Stephen King adaptations and "Spinal Tap" is the greatgranddaddy of stuff like Parks and Recreation and the Office.
I remember him as Meathead, and my 22-year-old son remembers him as the dad from Wolf of Wall Street. It's really amazing how many generations his work spans.
Oh dang. Last night before falling asleep my wife told me "some guy from Spinal Tap died" while scrolling on her phone. Didn't think much of it.
Wake up and first thing I do is read this...
Rob Reiner? Really? What a terrible shame. What a loss. His films and even his time on All in the Family really helped shape the cultural landscape.
Nothing had as large an impact on my sense of humor growing up as This is Spinal Tap. Just thinking about the movie now I chuckle to myself. Most of his other films are certified classics.
Well that's just terrible. I went to a trade school for learning audio engineering. One of the instructors always used a day to show "Spinal Tap" to his class. I didn't realize it was fiction for about the first 40m. The guy made some great films.
Reportedly killed by their son, who had struggled with addiction: https://people.com/rob-reiner-wife-michele-were-killed-by-so...
> In a 2016 interview with PEOPLE, Nick spoke about his years-long struggle with drug addiction, which began in his early teens and eventually left him living on the streets. He said he cycled in and out of rehab beginning around age 15, but as his addiction escalated, he drifted farther from home and spent significant stretches homeless in multiple states.
Rob Reiner directed a movie from a semi-autobiographical script his son co-wrote a few years ago. Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this.
(tangent) for those of us who had close experiences with addiction in our families, it's so obvious why "give them money" or "give them homes to live in" isn't a solution to homelesness. A close family member owned 3 properties and still was living in the streets by choice because of his addiction which evolved into a full blown paranoid schizophrenia. He almost lost it all but he was forcefully commited into a mental institution and rehab saved his life.
Just realize your personal experience isn't generalizable. Surveys I've seen report that about a third of homeless have drug problems, which means that the other two thirds may very well benefit from "give them homes to live in".
UCSF published a comprehensive study of homelessness in California in 2023 [1]. A few relevant points:
The ~1/3 substance use figure holds up (31% regular meth use, 24% report current substance-related problems). But the study found roughly equal proportions whose drug use decreased, stayed the same, or increased during homelessness. Many explicitly reported using to cope with being homeless, not the reverse.
On whether money helps: 89% cited housing costs as the primary barrier to exiting homelessness. When asked what would have prevented homelessness, 90% said a Housing Choice Voucher, 82% said a one-time $5-10K payment. Median income in the 6 months before homelessness was $960/month.
The severe-mental-illness-plus-addiction cases like the family member mentioned exist in the data, but the study suggests they're the minority. 75% of participants lost housing in the same county they're now homeless in. 90% lost their last housing in California. These are mostly Californians who got priced out.
[1] https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...
There is very good research to indicate that when housing costs a lot, versus geos where housing costs a little, homelessness clearly is lower. while this is not causation, the correlation is extremely clear. I think that Gregg Colburn, The University of Washington has done a good job arguing for this correlation and it's difficult to argue against it. What's nice about his research is it's not reliant on self-reported surveys to dig out these trends.
So, if somebody is inside of the house, we definitely want to try to keep them inside of the house. I also agree with your contention that when somebody hits the streets, they actually turn the drugs. And I believe the evidence points toward the ideas of this being a system That doesn't have a reverse gear on the car. If you keep somebody in the house, they won't go homeless. But if you give homeless a house or lodging, it doesn't return them back to the original function.
But one of the really interesting facts to me, which is in the study that you linked, but also in the other studies that I've red covering the same type of survey data, is almost never highlighted.
When you actually dig into the survey data, what you find out is that there is a radical problem with under employment. So let's do that math on the median monthly household income. I do understand it is a medium number, but it will give us a starting point to think about at least 50% of the individuals that are homeless.
Your study reports a median monthly household income of 960 dollars in the six months before homelessness. If that entire amount came from a single worker earning around the California statewide minimum wage at that time (about 14–15 dollars per hour in 2021–2022, ignoring higher local ordinances), that would correspond to roughly:
- 960 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 69 hours per month, or about 16 hours per week. - 960 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 64 hours per month, or about 15 hours per week.
For leaseholders at 1,400 dollars per month, the same rough calculation gives:
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 100 hours per month ≈ 23 hours per week. - 1,400 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 93 hours per month ≈ 21–22 hours per week.
We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)
Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue). This would appear to me to be an intuitive statement and possibly is simply created because you've already made up your mind. Unfortunately, after we make up our mind to do something, our brains are heavily subject to confirmation bias, which means it's incredibly difficult for people to take in new information or to consider new viewpoints. On the other hand, if you have good rational, logical rationale, then it should be able to be laid out fairly crisply.
However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.
In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.
As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.
> Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).
I already have in my prior comment:
>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
In other words, your logic is:
Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home
Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:
* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?
* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?
* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?
* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?
* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?
With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.
Okay I think I understand what happened. A couple posts ago you listed to an executive summary for CASPEH. I don't believe you've ever read the complete report, which is around 96 pages.
If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:
Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.
Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.
Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.
In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.
Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.
There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.
Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.
You may be confusing jameslk with me - I'm actually the one who linked the CASPEH exec summary. Your underemployment math is interesting, but I'd note the study also reports 34% have limitations in daily activities, 22% mobility limitations, 70% haven't worked 20+ hours weekly in 2+ years. When asked why, participants cited disability, age, transportation, and lack of housing itself as barriers. So the causation may be more circular than "fix jobs first" as the same factors driving underemployment are driving housing instability, and being unsheltered makes holding a job harder.
Yep sorry about that lost track of who did what.
But thank you for actually some very insightful comments and actually digging into the details. And I do agree with your contention that there is some sort of circular system issue going on here (ala Jay Forrester out of MIT).
It is pretty interesting. While you reported everything perfectly, I'll just paste in the detailed section at the bottom as it does add a little more detail and really does give us something to think about. FDR in 1944 suggested that there should be a second bill of rights. In many ways I am attracted to his framework. In his second bill of rights, the very first one was "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation."
It strikes me that having gainful employment in which you feel like you are contributing in some method to a society is incredibly foundational to good mental health. I think FDR recognized this and I don't think he was thinking about communism. I think he was indicating that we need to find worth for individuals. Of course, with World War II and his health issues, the somehow seemed to go by the side.
This is not somebody telling somebody on the street to get a job. It's a question of how do we enable people to get a job? And I believe if there is an opportunity for the government to spend tax dollars, it may be in incentivizing employers to take these individuals and be creative in how they employ them for direct benefits. It's hard for me to imagine that there isn't some economic way of incentivizing business to show entrepreneurship if we incentivize them correctly.
This doesn't mean that you don't figure out how to solve housing. It simply means that we think about things systemically.
"Participants noted substantial disconnection from labor markets, but many were looking for work.
Some of the disconnection may have been related to the lack of job opportunities during the pandemic, although participants did report that their age, disability, lack of transportation, and lack of housing interfered with their ability to work. Only 18% reported income from jobs (8% reported any income from formal employment and 11% from informal employment). Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly. Of all participants, 44% were looking for employment; among those younger than 62 and without a disability, 55% were."
Didn't work out well for the river camp in Santa Ana, CA 8 years ago (or so) that had to be bulldozed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhy3zI3wvAo
The vast majority (that accepted accommodation) destroyed the spaces and eventually fled back to the streets. It is generally not productive to simply rehome all the homeless en mass. There are first order drug abuse and mental illness issues that cannot be ignored.
As with any survey or most research really, it’s the sample the determines the finding. Homelessness is not easy to define precisely. Drug addiction, setting aside the fact that surveys are self reported, is a bit more cut and dried but from your response it’s not clear if alcohol is included, or drug history. Like if someone did some bad shrooms or had a bad acid trip and wound up homeless would that person be in the 2/3rds?
What would a bad trip that makes you homeless look like? Like you burnt your house down or something.
The number of people that became homeless due to a bad trip may be non-zero but it had to be really close. That's just not a realistic scenario.
You were renting and had a job, then had a bad trip that crushed your intelligence/mental health, causing you to get laid off and evicted.
Basically the Ted Kazinsky scenario. Or the guy who thought he was a glass of orange juice. Or Jim from Taxi. Many such cases.
> Just realize your personal experience isn't generalizable. Surveys I've seen report that about a third of homeless have drug problems, which means that the other two thirds may very well benefit from "give them homes to live in".
non sequitur
> "by choice because of"
Goodness, that doesn't look like a choice to me.
sorry for your situation but that description is inconsistent without medical insight
perhaps more importantly, ascribing legal treatment for a class of people ("homeless") based on this particular case is also unwise, at the least
100 years ago people like Rob Reiner's drug addict son would probably have been in an insane asylum.
100 years ago people like Rob Reiner's drug addict son's dealer would probably have been hanging from a tree.
note: this is not commentary on drug legalization, just commentary that "community efforts" were more involved in addressing negative social externalities than they are now - for better or for worse.
Not likely at all, most likely the drugs wouldn't have even been illegal, but an addict would certainly have been housed and institutionalized. More than half of mental patients were alcoholics and addicts.
Even 60 years ago that would probably have been the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
So you claim to know for certain that it virtually never happens that someone winds up homeless for financial reasons, like their rent got raised or they lost their job and couldn't find one that paid enough for the prevailing rents.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain how you determined this. Did you for instance survey homeless people in a number of US cities? Or perhaps you used some other method.
So far AFAIK this claim isn’t repeated by any reputable publishers. E.g. Associated Press and LA Times both published 2.5 hours after PEOPLE and did not make this claim.
Here's another independent report: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/rob-rei...
Also, People is credible for this type of reporting. They're owned by a major company, IAC, and they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer. They likely just have sources that other news outlets don't.
>they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer
TIL that the 'National Enquirer' was the most reliable news source during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. According to a Harvard law professor who gave the media an overall failing grade, the 'Enquirer' was the only publication that thoroughly followed every rumor and talked to every witness. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6n1kz5/til_th...>
The Enquirer also broke the John Edwards (vice-presidential candidate) affair story well before mainstream media picked it up. That doesn't make up for the reckless and sometimes completely nutso stories they print, but it is a reminder that they aren't always wrong.
That’s going a little far, I think. The Enquirer was mentioned during jury selection and not for facts. When the defense wanted to leak a story, they went to the New Yorker.
That was an eternity ago. They’re no longer worth anything in terms of reputation.
They were never worth anything in terms of reputation, hence the "TIL"
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> The Independent reported 10 minutes ago that LAPD is still claiming no person of interest in this case. > > Hard to know what’s real and what’s gossip.
I'm sorry, but it's People. I'm not a celeb gossip, but I don't recall them running bs headlines on this level. C'mon.
> Thanks. I’ve been following unfolding coverage at https://particle.news/share/lRL-d but hadn’t caught the Rolling Stone article.
I've been following it on my own news app as well, just didn't share a link to it as I thought it might be a bit ghoulish to piggyback on an unspeakably tragic celebrity death for a bit of self-promotion.
Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source. People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
The LAPD "no person of interest" thing is also just standard procedure. Cops don't publicly name suspects until charges are filed. Totally normal that the official process is slower than journalism.
Worse, people take "fairly reliable mainstream news source makes mistake or publishes propaganda op-ed" as a pretext to jump to sources that are way, way less reliable but publish things they want to hear.
> Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source.
I don't read celebrity news, how should I know People's track record?
What’s your news app?
I don’t have a news app. That was a maybe too subtle bit of sarcasm aimed at the guy I was responding too who is apparently the creator of a news app called Particle, and who mentioned that he is following the news of these deaths on Particle without mentioning his connection to it.
Update: Looks like the parent post has been flagged. I thought that might happen (or the author might edit it) which is why I quoted the original.
tech meme and memeorandum for me
> People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible. I don't think a brand has any inherent value and hasn't for many decades. The nytimes helped cheney launder fraudulent evidence for the invasion of iraq for chrissake.
Fwiw, maybe it is true. But reliable truth sailed a long time ago.
It's absolutely defamation if they have no or unreliable sources and something Reiner's son could sue over. They are a big enough publication to know the risks here.
They'll reveal those sources to a judge if it comes to it. They won't reveal them to the public because nobody wants to have their name attached to something like this.
It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
Meh. Information is often jumbled and wrong in the immediate aftermath of a newsworthy event, and it is tempting to accept tenuous claims which reinforce one's biases. Take the murder of Bob Lee, in which early reports were a bit off and convinced maaaaany people it was a street crime (confirming their biases about San Francsisco).
There's no real advantage to accepting PEOPLE's claim at this point. It's possibly wrong, and we'll probably know the truth in good time.
The Bob Lee comparison doesn't really hold up. The "random street crime" narrative there was driven primarily by right-wing tech executives on social media - Musk, Sacks, etc. - not by news outlets making factual claims. Fox amplified the SF crime angle but wasn't naming suspects (and I put Fox in it own category anyway, based on its track record).
Meanwhile, actual newsrooms did reasonable work: the SF Standard put nine reporters on it and ultimately broke the real story. Other local outlets pushed back on whether SF crime was as "horrific" as tech execs claimed.
Most importantly: speculating about the type of crime (random vs. targeted) isn't defamation. Naming a specific living person as a killer is. That's a categorically different level of legal exposure, which is why outlets don't do it unless they're confident in their sourcing. If this kind of reckless misattribution happened as often as people here seem to imply, defamation lawyers would be a lot busier and these outlets would be out of business.
That's still a terrible way of evaluating credibility, especially when a determination of defamation is not the same thing as a determination of truth.
Like I said
> It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
I wouldn't have felt bad if it did turn out to be wrong, I certainly left room open for doubt. But what I know about media outlets is they aren't often willing to put themselves in positions where they could get sued into oblivion.
There are obvious exceptions, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Candice Owens, but I think those exceptions have a level of insanity that powers their ability to make wild accusations without evidence.
“They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible.”
Not if they want sources again in the future. Assuming they have credible sources, it will prove them correct in due course. The vast majority of people aren’t grading news outlets on a minute-by-minute basis like this: if they read in People first it was his son, and two weeks from now it’s his son, they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
And if People burned the sources who told them this, industry people would remember that, too.
> Not if they want sources again in the future.
Then don't report it. Nothing about this story is so worth reporting on.
> they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.
> All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.
That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting. An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
And "wide variety of credibility"... what? Do you think major outlets just hire random people off the street and let them publish whatever? There are hiring standards, editors, and layers of review. The whole point of a professional newsroom is to ensure a baseline of credibility across the organization.
Seems like you've reverse-engineered the Substack model, where credibility really does rest with the individual writer, and mistakenly applied it to all of journalism. But that's not how legacy media works. The institution serves as a filter, which is exactly why it matters who's publishing.
> That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting.
This certainly a popular narrative, but... C'mon, there isn't a single publication in existence that is inherently trustworthy because of "institutional vetting". The journalist is the entity that can actually build trust, and that "institutional vetting" can only detract from it.
> An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
This is also another easy way of saying "capital regularly determines what headlines are considered credible". That is not the same thing as actual credibility. Have you never read Manufacturing Consent?
Granted, I don't know why capital would care in this case. But the idea that "institutional integrity" is anything but a liability is ridiculous.
I've read Manufacturing Consent more than once - it's one of my favorite books and Chomsky one of my favorite thinkers (really dismayed that he associated with Epstein but I digress). Anyway, you've got it backwards.
The propaganda model is explicitly not "capital determines what headlines are credible." Chomsky and Herman go out of their way to distinguish their structural critique from the crude conspiracy-theory version where owners call up editors and dictate coverage. That's the strawman critics use to dismiss them.
The five filters work through hiring practices, sourcing norms, resource allocation, advertising pressure, and ideological assumptions - not direct commands from capital. The bias is emergent and structural, not dictated. Chomsky makes this point repeatedly because he knows the "rich people control the news" framing is both wrong and easy to dismiss.
It's also not a general theory that institutional journalism can't accurately report facts. Chomsky cites mainstream sources constantly in his own work - he's not arguing the New York Times can't report that a building burned down.
Applying the propaganda model to whether People magazine can accurately report on a celebrity homicide is a stretch, to put it mildly. You've taken a sophisticated structural critique and flattened it into "all institutional journalism is fake, trust nothing."
Speaking of media, I found it really useless that before the names were published, the majority of news articles just said "78 and 68 year old persons found dead [RIP] at Rob Reiner's home", but I had to search for his and his wife's age to correlate that it's him and his wife. I think only 1 news article said, "authorities have not said the names, but those are the ages of Rob Reiner and his wife".
It's because they don't want to be wrong, while at the same time having to rush to publish because if they want clicks they need to be first. So they publish only what the cops initially tell them, even before they had time to inquire that the couple killed were indeed the residents.
That's a telltale sign of a news organization that doesn't have access to backroom sources.
I've always found it weird that the police cannot name them, but they can give out clues, even clues that are, to all intents and purposes, naming them.
In the interest of preserving anonymity, let's call him Rob R. No, er, wait, let's do R Reiner. There, that should do it
Lol reminds me of that partially redacted document about the Titan submarine that imploded.
There was like "submarine expert number 2, name redacted" and in expert 2's testimony he said something like "you may recall from my film, Titanic, that..." and I mean it could be anyone or maybe is definitely James Cameron
Lots of people worked on that film, and no doubt Cameron likes to hire fellow deep sea enthusiasts. It could be anybody! /s
That's not what was happening there. They weren't hiding the identity, it's that they had not positively identified the victims. The cops talked to journalists very fast.
They hadn't positively identified them, but they knew exactly how old they were?
It seems much more likely that they had identified them, but they hadn't gone through the full set of procedures (notifying family members, etc.) that are required before officially releasing names.
If that's the case, that's really just dumb side-skirting of compliance rules, how much difference does it make for a yet-notified family member to read "Persons aged [dad's age] and [mom's age] found dead at residence of [their last name]" compared to "Mr. and Mrs. [their last name] found dead."?
In any case, tragically, their daughter lived across the street and found them.
In a remarkable coincidence, the Reiners' son has just been booked on suspicion of murder:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/director-rob-re...
Maybe the cops were reading People in between scarfing down donuts and chain-smoking Marlboros.
The claim is that there was no sign of forced entry, implying whoever did it was already in the home.
> Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this
Also worth considering that Rob Reiner might have played his part in the roots of Nick's troubles ... after all Rob was his father and the drug problems started when he was still a child.
Are you a parent? Do you understand the challenges of parenting that includes the fact that "controlling" your child is ultimately impossible?
Yes, you can be attentive and engaged, ensure they're mentored and guided, are given discipline and instruction, etc. But they're still autonomous units that are going to do what the fuck they want to do.
Of course there are cases of abuse that can damage a child but that should not be a base assumption in this case (his other children appear to be fine).
"Hungry Ghosts" (or "Scattered Minds") by Gabor Maté is a very thought provoking book and quite relevant to the subject.
We are not well-served by treating addiction as simply a matter of will-power and "character".
This isn't to say that we don't all bear responsibility for our conduct as best we can, but sometimes it's way more than that. It's like accusing a schizophrenic of not trying hard enough to "be normal".
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Yeah, give them PTSD - that should help.
Poorly worded by the person you replied to.
I hope they meant that the military could give them the discipline and structure their parents were unable to.
Of course it depends on what military we're talking here, considering the situation in the world today.
That's not what they meant
I'd forgotten what an unusually strong and culturally-resonant line of movies the man had without (I think) the popular acclaim you might associate with them, like a low-profile Spielberg.
Spinal Tap
The Princess Bride
When Harry Met Sally
Sleepless in Seattle
Stand By Me
etc
A great loss, RIP
I'm just commenting to mention The Sure Thing, a delightful and endearing romcom with John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga, with small parts by Anthony Edwards, Nicollette Sheridan, and Tim Robbins.
This is indeed a delightful film. I tend to forget that Nicollette Sheridan was the titular character. It’s unusual (but perhaps explains some of Reiner’s interest, I wonder) that this film has an identifiable, personified McGuffin.
A Few Good Men is also a great movie IMHO.
And he was quite excellent in The Wolf of Wall Street (playing I think Leonardo's father?)
Very sad development.
Oh wow he did A Few Good Men, too? These comments are just crazy in how many influential movies he made to me, without me realizing they were by him. And how are you the first to mention AFGM? That's the best of the bunch!
He also co-wrote the pilot for Happy Days...
His first seven films are the kind of good that most filmmakers would like to have throughout a career, not starting one. He was also a writer on The Smothers Brothers before his role on All in the Family. He was definitely one of the greats.
He was also brilliant as Michael “Meathead” Stivik in the phenomenal TV series “All in the Family”.
Amazing how many classics he worked on throughout his career.
Throughout his entire career I have always thought "Meathead has done so well for himself! He really showed Archie."
Talking about Rob Reiner:
https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/people/rob-reiner?c...
https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/rob-rein...
Rob Reiner: The 60 Minutes Interview (2 months ago)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLeBquj8LKI
I remember a radio host in the 90's remarking about how ironic it was that three of the biggest movie directors at the time were: Opie (Ron Howard), Laverne (Penny Marshall) and MeatHead (Rob Reiner).
Indeed. I grew up watching AitF, and I remember being totally floored when I realized he directed “When Harry Met Sally.”
Really sad end to a great career and as far as I could tell, a decent human being.
I only ever watched the re-runs (1980s). Still, somehow I never made the connection that “meathead” was Rob Reiner.
It's definitely interesting seeing him physically morph from his younger days to today. When he first came on my radar as a director, I wondered if it was just another guy with the same name, I had to go look it up, and I was surprised. Seemed like a really great guy. :(
His last film was Spinal Tap II. I think if you could tell him that Spinal Tap would bookend his life, he'd be tickled by that.
The second installment isn't good... But he has more than enough decent work to be remembered by.
No, it isn't a patch on the original. But I did find it better than I expected at least. A low bar, but at least it passed it. ;)
I personally preferred the sequel to the original.
I loved the original but its pacing wasn’t all that great. I also felt II had better cohesion too.
I had the same thought when I looked up his filmography - highly underrated. No idea he made all those classics.
Amen. I can appreciate films. Reiner made Movies. Great movies.
Spielberg is an apt comparison.
Misery is another classic
Wow, I didn't know he directed Misery! Great film.
There’s a really good interview with Rob Reiner on Fresh Air, recorded as Spinal Tap 2 was being released a few months back. He talks all about the many movies he’s worked on as well as growing up in the household of a comedian. Well worth 45 minutes of your time:
https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/g-s1-87790/fresh-air-...
Rest in peace. "The Princess Bride" is a really fun, unique and beautiful piece of art that my wife and I revisit all the time. Nobody deserves to go like this and he'll be missed.
You might enjoy the pandemic-era Princess Bride Home Movie, which Rob Reiner and his father Carl Reiner had a scene in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29s1yU3nGkQ
It's a crowdsourced home-movie version produced by dozens of actors in the midst of pandemic lockdown, recording on their phones and using home made props. The actors rotate through the individual roles so you get a real range of performances. I found it delightful.
Worth checking out the opening scene to get a sense of it
Same. It’s a wonderful movie that can be thoroughly enjoyed by young and old alike!
It's inconceivable how good that movie is.
Anybody want a peanut?
As you wish.
And so quotable…
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I can't believe people voted me down for this! It's a direct quote from the movie, after Vizzini uses the word "inconceivable" you warthog-faced buffoons:
https://youtu.be/dTRKCXC0JFg?t=3
And for anyone else who is still clueless, the "warthog-faced buffoon" insult is also a direct quote from the movie. Lighten up, people!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vzU3TdqUKQ
It irritates me as well, the comment you were replying to was intentionally setting up for your reply for fun.
The book’s outstanding and different enough to be worth reading even (especially?) if you’ve seen the movie a hundred times.
It’s got a framing and woven-in narrative of the author stand-in tracking down this book his dad read him, discovering it was mostly awful, dry crap, and editing it down (and translating it) to a “the good parts” version like his dad read to him. The (kinda pathetic and melancholy) adult story going on is interesting to an adult reader, and… creates the opportunity to read the actual novel with a “the good parts” approach when reading it to a kid (this has to have been on purpose, it works great).
The author (William Goldman) was a screenwriter so the action scenes are snappy and great and the dialogue tight, but he also filled the book with jokes that only work in print, so you won’t just be getting a repeat of the movie on the humor side (though many of those jokes are in it, too).
Some sequences are greatly expanded and especially notable are large and effective back-story chapters for Fezzick and Inigo.
I really enjoyed Fezzick and Inigo's chapters. And the Zoo of Death! As I remember, the framing narrative was quite different, something about a screenwriter with some glaring personal issues IIRC. Worth reading if you love the movie, definitely.
In college, we printed out the screenplay, and picked parts, and read it together. It was tremendous fun. Highly recommended.
Incidentally, just the other day I thought a scene in a recent Pluribus episode was echoing it.
We were thinking the same thing! ;-)
Three great movies that he directed that everyone around my age would be relatively intimately familiar with: This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally
> Police are treating the deaths as apparent homicides. According to the L.A. Times, authorities have questioned a member of Reiner’s family in connection with the death. As of Sunday night, the LAPD have not officially identified a suspect, but Rolling Stone has confirmed that Reiner’s son, Nick, was involved in the homicide. A source confirmed to Rolling Stone that the couple’s daughter, Romy, found her parents’ bodies.
Alternative source:
> Senior law enforcement officials report that both had stab wounds
Tragic.
Stand By Me as well
Also Misery
He is still Archie Bunker's annoying son in law to me. I hear he did some interesting things since then though.
My best friend died in a family murder like this. A decade later the wounds of the survivors haven't healed.
At least Carl didn't live to suffer this.
Mel Brooks is gonna be sad.
I had the same thought almost immediately about being thankful that Carl Reiner wasn't around to see this.
Related, I love how close Mel and Carl were until the end: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/feb/20/love-and-free...
Before I realized that his father Carl died a few years ago, I wondered how he was dealing with this.
Journalism has always been hated by those in power and by proxy their followers.
It's arguable thats a sign that they're doing a good job.
Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police.
Most of them are trying to fight evil and make society better and are disliked for it.
They are a gritty grizzled bunch.
> Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police.
I’m with you on journalists, but the police have so many bad apples that I think the profession itself attracts the wrong kind of people.
Sometimes journalists (or "journalists") are the ones in power or they are controlled by those in power
I'd argue once it is controlled by those in power it stops being called journalism and becomes propaganda.
Who makes the distinction? If I'm not sure if something should be categorized as propaganda or journalism who do I ask?
I have a hard time thinking of any such example.
Certainly their editors and the publisher/owner, but journalists themselves?
The Soviet Union? China right now?
If you own the owners of media, you own all the journalists by virtue of the fact that to be a journalist requires someone to get a job as a journalist. In a place like the US you might have a handful of top people freelance and still be able to eat, but that is very rare.
You don't even need to go overseas. Just look at the NY Times and why they got the Iraq war so wrong or for even more egregious examples go and look at our wars before that. The fact that many of the high level positions on the news desk at the Times are filled by former employees of the US State department or intelligence agencies might give you a hint.
But then should you be blaming the journalists?
Also, is it even journalism at that point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
Oh I don't blame the journalists, I was just helping you think of examples.
According to POTUS, he died because of Trump Derangement Syndrome[0]. Very classy and totally normal behavior from our highest office.
0: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157241415688...
Out of all the things, this appears to be a significant turning point:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1pnccia/trump...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1pn8nny/rob_r...
These are currently at the top of that sub. The comments are very encouraging.
I would like to think that if Mr. Reiner saw that his death actually brought the country together, he would smile.
I've thought the same multiple times over the last few years. I can't remember all the events, but it was at least four separate times, most notably with January 6th. Every time it went like this:
1. Users on /r/conservative (& other conservative forums) show a surprisingly negative reaction to something done by the GOP
2. Over the next few days, their media starts repeating individual social media responses that seem to find agreement. They don't have to make sense, they just have to terminate the thought.
3. In the communities more and more voices spread those same responses while shouting down reasonable commenters from 1., declaring them "non-MAGA" or "RINOs"
4. After a few days/weeks, all opposing voices have been drowned out, and their moderation teams delete any posts that could sway their opinion/goes against the current.
Prion dynamics (per gpt):
- Misfolding & Conversion: A normal, functional prion protein (PrP C) changes shape into a misfolded, pathogenic form (PrP Sc), which acts as a template to convert more PrP C into PrP Sc.
- Self-Propagation: The core of prion dynamics is this autocatalytic cycle, where PrP Sc recruits and converts normal PrP C, leading to exponential growth. Aggregation: These misfolded proteins clump together, forming large aggregates (amyloid) that deposit in the brain, causing neurodegeneration.
- Fragmentation: For propagation to continue, large aggregates must break down (fragment) into smaller pieces (seeds) that can initiate new conversion cycles, a process crucial for disease progression and influenced by chaperones like Hsp104 in yeast.
The group you are describing would indeed need to remove the misfolded protein for survival.
In terms of hope:
".... For propagation to continue, large aggregates must break down (fragment) into smaller pieces (seeds) that can initiate new conversion cycles"
In other words, the Republican party could be looking at serious fracturing into many many post-mango camps, ala Margerie Taylor Green leaving the MAGA camp. These dynamics are probably exactly how the conservatives got co-opted by the MAGA strain.
I appreciate where you are going with this. Solid.
The Conservative subreddit is not at all indicative of the average conservative American's opinion. Actual conservatives participate in other forums.
Tone: genuine question:
Do you mean like r/tuesday? If not, please help me find the common ground with my normie brothers and sisters.
I mean completely different websites. Facebook, Truth Social, X. Most conservatives are middle aged and above, they're not on Reddit.
If you think about it, if you count 2015 campaign, Trump has been campaigning or in office for 10 years, with 3 more to go. That’s thirteen. fucking. years.
No man is that interesting. This person’s “opinion” on the world has just been utterly exhausting.
A decade of a reign like that caused damage.
TDSDS seems more of a real thing than TDS. The intellectual equivalent of "I know you are, but what am I?"
A bit hypocritical for him to say that after his reaction to people commenting on Charlie Kirk’s murder.
POTUS seems a little deranged there.
The mad king is a common literary trope, I guess for good reason.
Literary trope? It’s not a trope, it Biblical. How many Kings in the Bible became afflicted with corruption and possession? It’s almost like God really wanted to make a point about great power.
How are those mutually exclusive? The bible was definitely something I was thinking of when I wrote that.
A little?
FWIW, if you have HBOMax, you can watch what is now, sadly, his final film, Spinal Tap 2. It just arrived there yesterday.
(They also just got the original if you want to watch it again)
This is very sad news.
No one else has mentioned it but among all his other great performances his hair-trigger angry dad in Wolf of Wall Street is hilarious.
I think being able to be both funny in his anger but also a bit intimidating and then go to being a warm father figure is something he would not have been able to portray without genuine charisma.
As an aside, it's been fascinating reading the comments here about news media.
People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters; never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.
Doing the hard work can't compete with podcasters/entertainers "just asking questions". We're in a pretty sad state right now.
I think there some jobs where community acknowledgment of "oh wow you do THAT job, thank you" can make up for lower pay. I think in states that have low teacher pay, for example, many think it's worth it so long as it comes with acknowledgment of the hard work and dedication -- which, of course, it often doesn't.
The counter-argument is probably that if it were truly acknowledged, then the pay itself would be higher. But I don't think it's the case that the average person in Florida thinks less of teachers than someone in New York. (I'm including cost of living adjustments in making this comparison btw.)
I don't disagree with the items you lay out, and maybe the ones you list are most important. But I do think "respect" belongs on the list, too.
"corporatism" - come on now. The reason why news was decent and the job was decent for a good amount of time was that newspapers were a natural monopoly. Fat, juicy profits and "owned" cities meant the owners could just say "I don't really care, just print approximately the truth and don't alienate readers across the broad spectrum that we have".... "oh, and I guess pay the journalists decently too, because I'm swimming in money"
> newspapers were a natural monopoly
What on earth are you talking about? Most major cities have had multiple papers in cutthroat competition with each other for decades. If the New York Times got a story wrong, the Wall Street Journal would happily take the opportunity to correct them and vice versa. In smaller cities with one big paper (like Baltimore with The Sun), the local tabloids (like The City Paper) would relish any opportunity to embarrass the paper of record if they got something wrong.
The era of monopolistic journalism is the new thing, not the old thing. The corporatism GP is referring to is conglomerates like Sinclair and Tribune Online Content (Tronc) buying up tons of local papers and broadcast stations and “cutting costs” by shutting down things like investigative reporting.
Major cities had more than one - the rest did not. The major cities had 2-3, so a duopoly. They all minted money for decades before the internet.
The local newspapers in question have terrible economics now because of the internet. The competition has come from the internet. Sinclair is dying, because they have bought a bunch of dying/dead assets. Tronc is the same. There was nothing to do here, the newspaper business as it worked previously is dead with a few exceptions.
The business is dead. The people involved aren't getting paid well, the owners are losing money, it's all bad when economics go bad.
> natural monopoly
Renting time on a printing press is not exorbitant.
Buying out local printing presses (and/or getting exclusivity in return for your business), is anticompetitive and sometimes illegal, but it's definitely not natural.
Newspapers tended to own presses. On top of that, the vast majority of their other costs were fixed costs. It's a natural monopoly, a stock standard example and the US government had to step in with the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970.
Colorado has had over 1,000 papers. The tactics of the largest paper during the mid 20th century included cries for attention that no dignified monopolist would try.
Pre-internet, "Colorado" wasn't a market. Dozens of markets existed in Colorado. If you don't understand that, it's fine, but stay out of the conversation.
By that logic everything is a monopoly.
Car manufacturers have a monopoly on cars.
Smartphone manufacturers on smartphones.
Mankind has a monopoly on creating humans.
There was no logic, it was a premise.... Maybe understand the basics of english sentence construction.
And now do the same for the meaning of the word monopoly
Look up "newspaper joint operating agreements" and the "Newspaper Preservation Act". They were literally government sanctioned monopoly/duopoly structures from a business perspective to save newspapers from going to 1 paper towns. Ie, the government stepped in to help what was a process towards natural monopolies all over the country. The seattle times, the denver post were effectively monopolies via JOAs, and the san diego union tribune was a monopoly in its day (without a JOA). There are endless small city / large town examples.
You are clueless about newspapers in their heyday. It was like 60 years ago. No need to go around correcting people on a topic you know nothing about.
You brought some important points to this discussion, but needlessly also a “from my parents basement in Montana I stab at thee” vibe.
> I don't know why anyone would believe that.
In the aggregate your comments provided an informational response to that. Thank you!
> newspapers were a natural monopoly
I don't know why anyone would believe that.
Because the vast majority of towns and small cities had 1 main newspaper. Bigger cities had 2 or 3. It was money as far as the eye could see for the owners.
"Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?"
Teachers, but point taken.
Referees, who are seemingly out to make both sides lose.
A referee is a perfect analogy. We love to rate an umpire's call as "bad" after watching the slow motion replay 25 times, not based on the split second one-shot of information they had when they made it.
Yeah but sports aren't essential to society, and it really doesn't matter who wins, beyond fanning the flames of tribalism and religious proxy battles and advertising endorsements and gambling and hooliganism.
But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society.
Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them.
Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
Ah yes, let's get rid of sports and art and anything that isn't "strictly necessary." Such a wonderful life that would be with nothing to live for.
If all you have to live for is sports, then you desperately need more education and better journalism and mental health care.
I'm not saying get rid of them, and I didn't mention art or music or exercise, which are far more useful and enriching than sports.
Just don't sacrifice much more important things for sports, like so many high schools and colleges and universities do.
Our society is NOT existentially suffering from a lack of referees, as much as a lack of good teachers and journalists.
Get your priorities straight. It really doesn't matter if your sportsball team wins or loses, but it does extremely matter if your children are educated and informed or not.
Doctors.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.
> Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
This is where journalistic reputation comes in. Do you trust the journalistic entity providing the story? Do they have a history of being correct? Has information from anonymous sources in other stories proven to be true?
I don't go by that, it sounds like a recipe for disaster, too many stories propagated by major news orgs that were later retracted over the years.
Such stories are notable and egregious because they're rare. They definitely do happen -- the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access particularly bothers me. Perhaps a small number of such events are "too many", but they aren't common in reputable media.
> the NYT carrying water for Bush's Iraq war agenda to preserve access
Judith Miller was not a politically neutral journalist trying to preserve access, she was a deeply, actively involved long-time Iraq hawk doing propaganda for her ideological faction.
Right. Scooter Libby portrayed as a “Hill staffer”.
I was involved in writing a history book of an organization, and we used what was termed "journalistic integrity."
We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).
The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.
Sure, but a lot of major news orgs publish things that are later found to be patently false or incorrect, so the onus is on the facts presented for me and many readers, the journalistic integrity angle is dead in my eyes.
False with the benefit of hindsight, because more facts emerged, or maliciously false?
The latter among major news orgs is incredibly rare.
At least since 2016 and beyond I've seen insanely verifiably false claims from mainstream media if you just look up raw sources. Starting with the Covington High Schoolers, within minutes of the story dropping I was able to validate that CNN a major news corporation was in fact lying, why?
Then there was a lot of shenanigans regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There was a headline from a letter written by Intelligence Officers that made it sound like the actually forensically valid laptop itself was faked Russian disinformation, but it turned out to be valid.
When it comes to politics every major news org fails misserably. Their inability to contain personal biases is astounding to me. I want raw facts if you're going to make political assertions or its just propaganda. I don't care which side is doing what, if they're doing wrong expose them all, but use facts and evidence, not just TMZ / tabloid level shenanigans. Everyone is behaving like teenagers whenever politics is brought up these days.
Well, that may be, but that's still on the news outlet.
We currently reward outlets that spew out junk, right off the bat, and penalize outlets that take the time to validate the data. Some outlets almost certainly make it up, on the spot. No downside.
Back in the 1990s/early 200s, Michael Ramirez (a political cartoonist) posted a comic, showing three pairs of shoes.
On the left, were a massive pair of battered brogue wingtips. Under them, was the caption "Cronkite."
In the middle, was a very small pair of oxfords; both left. Its caption was "Rather."
The right, was captioned "Couric," and featured a big pair of clown shoes.
As far as the anonymous sourcing goes, that has to do with the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible.
There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted
> the exposed issues that some news outlets simply claim to have “sources” and when exposed they either don’t or they aren’t credible
Source?
Fake sources (outside the gossip and celebrity columns and a couple of cheap tabloids in any given country) is essentially a non-issue even now.
“non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run.
It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source.
If you have examples it would be interesting.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/?embedded...
Bloomberg has come out with the linked story in 2021. They have never provided any other detail; no other journalist has been able to corroborate anything advanced in the story. Through grapevines, we've been able to ascertain that Bloomberg based the whole story on a single source that they massively misunderstood.
That story is the worst case scenario, and thank god, it's extremely rare to find such a blunder. Reading the comments here, you'd think half the reporting in the world is exactly as wrong as that one single thing.
I mean I suppose in all fairness we should carve out a huge exception for tech and medical stories.
Perhaps it is my/our geek bias that we habitually do, and we are therefore excusing some of this without intending to? It is worth pondering.
And the biggest problem of all: They expect it to be free.
I expect it to be free when the ad revenues are huge and the titles are “you WON’T believe what Elon said on Xitter!” clickbait.
This is why substack exists
Even when I pay, I’m still bombarded with ads.
And you’re never going to get all the angles from a single source. So short of paying a couple thousand dollars, and still getting ads, many people become cheap in exchange for the cheap experience pushed on them.
Are you sure that a lot of individuals hold those contradictory positions?
Or do the contradictions only exist across multiple persons?
(Tangent: anyone know if there's a term for this fallacy? I.e., claiming that an attribute exists for some/all of a group's members, when in fact that attribute only applies to the collective itself?)
In my experience (dramatized):
Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout".
Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
Also doctors: Patients want schedules to run on-time but come in with a laundry list of concerns and will expect to be carefully listened to for 30 minutes during their 20 minute appointment. Medical systems insist on a 20 minute appointment even for complex cases or instances where translators are needed. Patients are non-compliant with discharge instructions and then get re-admitted which penalizes the MDs who discharged yet insurance pushes hospitals to discharge ASAP. I could go on and on...
> Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it.
'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
That's their problem. They're trying to give people what they want instead of being objective. They're supposed to be objective. What's that you say? Their objectivity is not rewarded? Well, neither is this.
Journalistic ethics speaks about impartiality, not objectivity, and that has always brought me comfort. I'm dismayed by young uns talking about a joke being objectively funny, or one movie in a series being objectively better than another. It is an Anti-literate trend.
Is this your cheeky and coy way of saying that objectivity is not possible? What's really the difference between impartiality and objectivity in this context? Sounds like you're just being a wordsmith.
Correct, objectivity is not possible. Human observation is never perfectly neutral.
What we call "objective" is usually just invisible judgment that aligns with our priors. An observer's choices about what to include, exclude, measure, or frame shape reality long before conclusions appear.
Scientific facts are just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
I want journalists to try to answer the 6 W's and make an effort to represent the stated positions of all parties mentioned. At least with that effort, you can have at least a chance at seeing what bias is in play. Most "journalism" fails on this metric by a wide margin.
Is any of this really any different than any other time in history, though?
yeah I was going to say. Journalism has always been hated by those in power and by proxy their followers.
Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police.
Most of them are trying to fight evil and make society better and are hated for it.
That’s because the journalists of today that work for corporate outlets frame stories in ways that benefit power and police area agents of power, namely the business owners.
Yes, absolutely. Journalism was in a much better standing a few decades ago.
That's a function of time and technology, and our demands as consumers, not journalistic skill.
If a journalist has an entire day to gather facts and write the story before it's published in the newspaper the next day, it's going to be a lot more accurate than the realtime demands of "we are hearing reports of a bomb threat in the vicinity of..."
> Journalism was in a much better standing a few decades ago
Many more people paid for journalism a few decades ago. People who only consume free media are obviously going to see more junk.
Great point, and no! Same with "truth." What is it? History is written by the victor.
And they want it for free
> People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
Not contradictory. People want information to be verified quickly. That's the job. The person who can do it the fastest gets the scoop. Publishing unverified stuff isn't doing the job faster, it's not doing the job. You can get away with cheating for a bit, as you can probably guess what's going to wind up getting verified most of the time, but that's all the more reason to punish cheaters when they eventually are caught.
And even then, publishing rumors and speculation are fine so long as they are clearly noted as such. It is only when unverified statements are treated as facts that there is a problem.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
You're not supposed to cite an anonymous source saying there are bodies buried; you're supposed to learn where the bodies are buried from the anonymous sources and then show the bodies as evidence. There is no need for an appeal to authority when you have proof. If a story relies on cited sources they should be named, and if no one is willing to go on the record then you shouldn't be relying on cited sources.
Also we should be pushing for strong whistleblower protections, especially reporting when whistleblowers are retaliated against.
> They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters
Who is asking for either raw data streams or that the news act as filters? People expect evidence (ie things that can be verified) and analysis (ie context for the evidence presented). Omitting unreliable evidence is fine, but people complain when the standard for reliable evidence changes without good reason.
> never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
If you publish actual facts, they will remain facts no matter what new facts emerge. Truth never contradicts truth, it only expands the story. It is perfectly fine to have incomplete facts, you better have a damn good reason if you have false facts.
> They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
No one wants neutrality, they want integrity. You can enthusiastically report that your side is right any day of the week so long as you're also willing to report when they're wrong. It's when evidence is chosen to fit the narrative rather than the narrative developed around the evidence that there's a problem.
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low.
Morale should be low in an industry driven to compromise it's standards and race to the bottom, and the worst offenders are the most highly rewarded. This should be an impetus for change.
Completely tragic. Rob Reiner's movies brought so much good into people's lives. The Princess Bride still remains a favorite. Today is a very sad and inconceivable end.
I just watched Spinal Tap 2 last week and enjoyed it.
RIP Rob and Michelle.
I had really high hopes but low expectations for Tap 2, just because it can be really tricky to follow up on a cult classic without totally stepping in it. I drove way out to see it on IMAX, and the entire family loved it.
May Reiner, as they say, Tap into the afterlife!
What is the benefit of seeing a regular film on an imax screen? Just bigger (too big?), or do they have taller footage?
Don't exactly know the difference in footage. I will say that I was on the fence about whether IMAX was a big deal for Spinal Tap 2, but afterwards we all felt like it was worth seeing in IMAX. Part of why I saw it in IMAX is that it was an early showing (IIRC the day before official release) and the IMAX theater 30 minutes away was the only option for seeing it that night.
The primary reason it shined in IMAX was the concert footage; It's giving "I'm on stage at a Tap concert".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reiner
RIP Rob Reiner. The Princess Bride is one of my all-time favorite movies. I have a theory (born out by experience) that most American-born software engineers can quote at least one line from TBL. I often use it as an opener with new hires.
Death can not stop true love. It can only delay it for a while.
I only knew him from directing Harry Met Sally and Wolf of Wall street where almost all of his scenes are hillarious, especially the one where he burst into the room abusing DiCaprio and his gang over expenses.
RIP.
He directed The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, and Misery. Didn't know this, but he directed a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap.
Yes,I know BUT of his personal works, those two remain the only ones I have seen. And also A Few Good Men (I did not know it was one of his works till now)
Thanks for The Princess Bride and Sleepless in Seattle. Rest in peace.
My heart breaks for Romy having to find her parents like that. She seemed to be a sweet kid who idolized her dad on Twitter.
I'm not going to link to it, but the POTUS posted overnight about this, and even by the standards of that particular social media account, it was probably a new low. Someone in another forum I read regularly said of it "I'm going to show this to my kids to help teach them what the word sociopath means". It's not even the usual "politicizing a tragedy", just the complete inhumanity and self-centeredness on display. Look it up yourself if you want, but bring a bag.
To elaborate a bit for those who don't want to go read that sort of thing: Trump said Reiner was killed because he made people so angry by being opposed to Trump. There were a bunch of asides about Reiner's talent and mental state, and it closed with trying to brag about (fictional) administration accomplishments.
Trump's a piece of work, all right.
> Trump's a piece of work, all right.
I’ve not seen it spelled like that that before.
I don't take from it personality judgements, so much as it makes me want to look into how Reiner was trying to develop a series called 'The Spy and the Asset' on how Putin and Trump met and began working together.
That tracks for me, so Trump has personal reasons for behaving the way he does, though arguably self-preservation would induce him to not carry on the way he has done. But then he cannot be quiet about things he's guilty of, so I can't see his behavior as anything other than having a motive for just what's happened. I can't imagine he would take Rob's proposed series with equinamity: I'd love to know what Rob knew.
Jesus Christ. "When Harry met Sally" is easily the best romcom of all times.
Definitely up there. "Misery" is one of the best Stephen King adaptations and "Spinal Tap" is the greatgranddaddy of stuff like Parks and Recreation and the Office.
So sad. To me, he's primarily the "Spinal Tap" guy, but he did so much more.
I remember him as Meathead, and my 22-year-old son remembers him as the dad from Wolf of Wall Street. It's really amazing how many generations his work spans.
True, Marti di Bergi and all that. But he made so many other popular films.
Oh dang. Last night before falling asleep my wife told me "some guy from Spinal Tap died" while scrolling on her phone. Didn't think much of it.
Wake up and first thing I do is read this...
Rob Reiner? Really? What a terrible shame. What a loss. His films and even his time on All in the Family really helped shape the cultural landscape.
Nothing had as large an impact on my sense of humor growing up as This is Spinal Tap. Just thinking about the movie now I chuckle to myself. Most of his other films are certified classics.
He will be greatly missed.
Spinal Tap is a great film, but he did so much more.
Dear Mr. Reiner,
Thank you for giving me Flipped. May you rest deeply now.
Well that's just terrible. I went to a trade school for learning audio engineering. One of the instructors always used a day to show "Spinal Tap" to his class. I didn't realize it was fiction for about the first 40m. The guy made some great films.
Having been in a metal band and known guys that toured, I can assure you that This is Spinal Tap is a real life depiction of being in a metal band.
> I didn't realize it was fiction
Amusingly, neither did Liam Gallagher until he was 30:
> https://www.loudersound.com/features/oasis-liam-gallagher-sp...
> This story was subsequently related to Harry Shearer aka Derek Smalls, who was most amused.
> "It's fair enough," he responded. "I was under the impression for some time that Oasis was a real band."
I'm dying!
Aren't they a Beatles tribute act?
Terrible. I enjoyed many of his films, and count Spinal Tap, Misery and Stand by Me among my favourites. Rest in Peace!
RIP! What a terrible way to go...
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“What da fu*k you sayin? Jordan, are you f*ckin’ high?!”
RIP
Something is wrong with your keyboard.
It's a Wolf of Wall Street quote.
I don't think the source was the concern .
I'd like to honor Rob Reiner and This is Spinal Tap by mentioning my work and other peoples' successful projects:
Jimmy Fallon, manager, and band Stillwater in the film "Almost Famous".
Ari Gold in Entourage
And Wayne's World, I would have to say.