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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the absolute stupidest way to have lost $5 million.

The claim was very specific: Prove this data isn't from the 2020 election. All you had to do was actually include 2020 election data in the set. And right there, the problem becomes much harder.

Hell, you could have just used a dump of 2020 election data and been fine. Just claim it proves your accusations.

And that's probably part of the reason that they worded the challenge like that. Because it's the easiest one to manufacture reasonably well. Yet they still fucked it up.

I still cannot believe how anyone can believe in the competence of anyone in Trump's political sphere after the Four Seasons fiasco. How often does one have to kick themselves square in the dick before people start wondering if they're not the sharpest bulb in the box?

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> The claim was very specific: Prove this data isn't from the 2020 election. All you had to do was actually include 2020 election data in the set. And right there, the problem becomes much harder.

The core of the arbitration decision is that "election data" specifically meant "packet captures of machines related to the election," relying on the fact that pretty much everyone (sans Lindell) understood that that was the kind of data they expected to have. Lindell instead had a tactic of relying on him being the ultimate arbiter of what satisfied "election data" as an ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card (which likely could have run afoul of other good-faith laws, although arbitration didn't analyze that point because they didn't need to go that far).

The Four Seasons fiasco is so strange. I remember hearing in an interview with that business owner that they (the business) explicitly told the Rudy team (during the phone call) that they were a landscaping company, not the hotel, and Rudy's team confirmed that they knew that and still wanted to use their building for their press conference.

I bet the landscaping company was called after the location was already internally shortlisted by mistake, and some people would've lost face if they suddenly had to change it, so they rolled with it and doubled-down.

I think the rather dumb justification was that they had already announced they would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons, were denied by the hotel, and thought this would somehow be a less embarrassing out than simply finding a more reasonable location without the same name.

It's really surreal to remember how unstrange it was at that point. Hair dye dripping down Guiliani's face as spearheaded a blatant lie everyone knew was a lie whilst trying to overturn an election. Just completely insanity all around, and yet, it didn't feel that far off from everything that had preceded it. Just the frog getting a little hotter.

I mean if you squint... everyone watched it, because of the location and general wtf-ery. Could it have been a clever bit of PR psychological hackery?

Nah.

But, like, maybe.

"before people start wondering if they're not the sharpest bulb in the box?"

Sharpness is relative.

It also degrades.

At 40 I'm definitely not as sharp as I was at 20. I mean... Give me a leetcode challenge today, and I'll flunk a lot of them.

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