The Supreme Court said Monday it would not take up the case Ralph W. Baker, Jr. v. Ta-Nehisi Coates et al, a copyright dispute in which Baker alleged Coates’ book “The Water Dancer” plagiarized Baker’s book “Shock Exchange: How Inner-City Kids From Brooklyn Predicted the Great Recession and the Pain Ahead.”
[…]
The justices did not give a reason for why they were recusing and the court has not responded to a request for comment, but Barrett, Gorsuch, Jackson and Sotomayor all published books through Penguin Random House, whose parent company Bertelsmann was named as a party in the case.
It’s unclear why Alito recused himself from the case, though judicial ethics watchdog Fix the Court speculates it’s possible he could have purchased stock in one of the other parties named in the case, such as Apple, Warner Bros. or Disney, or Amazon, which owns MGM Studios, a party in the suit.
A Bluesky thread…
Ketanji Brown Jackson “signed a book deal, reportedly worth $3 million, in 2022 after she joined the Court. Penguin Random House will publish her memoir.”
Amy Coney Barrett “reportedly signed a $2 million book deal with Penguin Random House in 2021”
Neil Gorsuch: “Penguin Random House, which published a book that consisted of his writings and speeches with a splash of memoir thrown in, paid him $650,000 from 2018 to 2020. The next year, he signed another deal with HarperCollins for $250,000.”
Sonia Sotomayor: $3.8 million in book deals since joining the court
https://subium.com/profile/zacheverson.com/post/3lpkvppkzms2y
There are source links at the thread if you’re interested.
Here’s an incredibly cold take: If the Supreme Court is going to exist, Supreme Court justices get to own nothing for the rest of their days. Like, you basically become a ward of the state.
We’ll help you find a house, give you a reasonable salary to live a nice life, and you should be scared that if you accidentally accept a coffee from a close friend you might get into serious trouble because of if.
The Supreme Court justices should all have to share an apartment and ride a 9 person tandem bike to the Court building.
One big robe, too.
Pros:
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Never have to worry about money or needs
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Never have to think about what to wear (it’s always the big 9 person robe)
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Great exercise on the bike
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Always have 8 inseparable best friends for life (physically connected via the robe, can only travel together on the bike)
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Only have to pay for 1 ticket at the movies or 1 cafeteria tray
Cons:
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Not allowed to hoard money (everything you acquire, inherit, or previously owned is redistributed)
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Can’t get married (mitigated by the mandatory Judicial polycule)
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No privacy (sitcom camera crew also goes everywhere with them)
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pack the court. into a phone booth. and then lock it. and then throw it in the ocean
chained to a sinking anchor
Wait… now some Supremes decide theres a conflict of interest such that they’d need to recuse themselves?
Supreme loophole
Shouldn’t these types of extra curricular income methods be … illegal? Just seems like a form of bribery with extra steps.
I think you’ll find America doesn’t have bribery or corruption
The law says you can do that stuff so it’s fine.
considering those books will sell like 2000 copies, how is this anything other than corruption
And there’s something immensely sad to me how doofuses who work for places such as the NYT read such books and write about them. Doofuses pretend - or actually believe - they gained “insights”. “Auto-hagiography” is anything but enlightening. And I wonder how often the books are actually by the person with their name on it. It’s ez money either way. Why not skip of highly time-consuming effort of thinking and writing and use a ghostwriter.
Even worse (but funnier), said doofuses are rapidly being replaced with AI on both ends of the slop pipe, so it will soon be, if it’s not already, AI models spitting out reviews for books written by AI models.
Imagine, an entire industry worth millions (billions?) of dollars in political bribes being laundered behind a thin facade of AI slop regurgitating itself over and over
Human centipedeAI slop centipede
-–
I never quite thought of that until I saw your comment. It’ll just get worse. I wonder how long it is until CEOs who make millions a year are caught using AI to do their job because they are busy playing golf or trying to screw models. And then stockholders will get really angry and demand how it was the upper-level execs didn’t catch on. The reason turns out to be nobody on upper levels actually works anymore. It’s AI all the way.
I actually started laughing when I read this.
Google’s head of search, Liz Reid, says AI Mode is “Google Search transformed with AI at its core." Reid is essentially saying that over time, all of Google’s AI features will be injected into search. “And that begins today.”
It doesn’t matter how sarcastic or negativistic I am - reality usually trumps me. “And that begins today.” Fuck me.
I put something into Google today for the first time in like three years and saw something that I had never seen there: no results at all. All my usual search engines turned up something. What the hell are they even doing there, anymore? You can’t serve me ads if you don’t even show results!
Yesterday I wanted to post at Hexbear about the FDA’s new rules about covid boosters. Basically have to be over 65 or have preconditions to get them more easily. I only knew about a paywalled article. I googled “FDA covid boosters over 65 preconditions” but I got the paywalled link I didn’t want and total junk results. I went to google news and I didn’t get any results. Not even the paywall article. I gave up in disgust and I decided to try again today. I did it today (~12 hours ago) and I got the very similar outcomes. I ended up posting a shitty article that reeked of AI because that’s all my searches could find.
I did the google search right now and it seems to work like old google. It gives actual results for me - FDA covid boosters over 65 preconditions. But at google news - it’s still shit. It only gives 2 results. Neither of them is the paywall.
I have a weird feeling like google is already extensively using AI. AI is intentionally wasting people’s time so we google over and over and over again. We’re training the fucking thing. It’s forcing us to format our phrasing how google wants. Plus - it’s most likely learning how to obfuscate so it can get even worse. An inferior product makes google more money.
Baker loses his appeal, which frankly is the right call and idk why it got to the point of SC members recusing themselves in the first place. Baker’s claim of plagiarism was extremely flimsy, I read some of the supposedly plagiarized passages and they have literally nothing in common except being written in a conversational style.
This all reads like a publicity plot to me. The SC wants to do something that makes them look ethical and principled to counter all of the recent news about their blatant corruption, so they pick this case where they were absolutely not going to reverse the lower court’s decision in order to do it. Really they should have just indicated from the jump that they had no interest in taking the case.
All the SC justices are getting free book publicity from this too
