Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly...
Yeah, that’s inciting insurrection/rebellion. If this guy didn’t already have people monitoring him 24/7, he sure as shit does now. And well he should.
Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won....
We (lawyers) are actually already ethically obligated to serve up bad lawyers for discipline. It’s Rule 8.3, colloquially known as the duty to rat out your colleagues.
Civil liberties groups are raising alarms about a bill making its way through Congress that applies pressure for a ban on travel to Iran for Americans using U.S. passports. The rights groups see the bill as part of a growing attempt to control the travel of American citizens and bar Iranian Americans in particular from...
Well, there it is: if you’re an Iranian-American, you should get an Iranian passport if you can. By extension, that’s probably good advice for anyone who can get multiple passports (and kind of always has been).
I really wish we could dispense the myth of “good lawyers” in this context. That’s not to say that there aren’t such things as good and bad lawyers–there are–but “wealthy clients get away with stuff because they can afford better lawyers” doesn’t really tell the story. Even if you have okay lawyers who fuck up a lot, if you have all the money in the world (or they think you do), you can get them to just keep working to try to fix it and throw new shit at the wall until something sticks. Normal people eventually run out of money.
The “every right available to the defense” list is an exhaustible list. If your client is Donald Trump and your goal is to stall, well, many or even most defense lawyers are going to know everything that goes on that list. It doesn’t matter whether they charge $100 or $1000 an hour, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re fresh out of law school or have been practicing 30 years. A public defender can stall a case if he wants to.
Donald Trump and other rich litigants aren’t buying “better lawyers”. Those lawyers don’t know more or have unique, novel trial strategies that work magic on the courts. And you can watch a trial to see that: There isn’t a huge qualitative difference between the case that OJ’s very expensive defense counsel put on and the case that Marcia Clark (a public servant) put on. Why? Because both sides spent a fortune. They didn’t get better lawyers. They just got more of their lawyers’ time. Simpson spent maybe $6 million on his lawyers, and the taxpayers of California spent $9 million on theirs. Johnnie Cochran was an extremely effective trial lawyer, but I don’t think anyone would say any of Trump’s lawyers is a once-in-a-generation talent.
The only reason you don’t want a public defender is that the public defender is overworked. He has hundreds or thousands of clients and simply can’t devote time to you. The public defenders in my jurisdiction are absolutely the smartest, best experienced criminal lawyers in town. Why? Because they’ve worked hundreds of criminal trials! But those guys don’t have a thousand hours to look up case law in order to exhaust the list of rights for a defendant who needs to put off getting convicted until after November. Even Alina Habba can figure out the whole list if you throw an arbitrarily large pile of cash at her and let her put a room full of junior associates on it for a month.
It’s not better lawyers. It’s just more lawyer time.
And bribes. It’s also bribes.
I say all this because I think a lot of people think that more expensive lawyer = better lawyer, and that’s just not true. For many, many cases, hiring a cheaper lawyer can get you much further if it means your money buys more of your lawyer’s time. That’s the difference between being able to keep your lawyer if you have to appeal and not being able to appeal at all. It’s the difference between going to trial and taking a less favorable settlement, and it’s the difference between being able to pay for more hearings (say, for example, if you need to jam up the proceedings with frivolous motions) and going straight to the merits.
I don’t generally do criminal work, but many, many more of the sad or frustrating “this is the end of the line” talks I’ve had with clients have had to do with the clients’ financial situations than with the actual merits of their cases. At some point it’s often just not cost effective for most people to pursue further litigation, and it doesn’t matter who the lawyer is. If you’re a member of the 1%, however–well, then you never have to worry about that. Just keep litigating forever, and it doesn’t matter whether your lawyer is Clarence Darrow or Rudy fucking Giuliani.
So we should just not let the people currently sick have the cure? 🤔
Even in your analogy, curing any cancer today, even if it doesn’t extend to future sufferers, is an improvement over curing no one. Because fuck cancer, and fuck student loans.
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
That’s a chicken and egg problem, though, isn’t it: Netanyahu’s government wants Hamas because the conflict keeps Bibi out of prison, and Hamas wants to remain relevant. All the same, the Israeli and Palestinian people are the ones who suffer due to both regimes being in power, and Hamas doesn’t shed its guilt just because Israel doesn’t want a reasonable Palestinian government. Neither side wants to blink because they have multi-generational hatred for the other side, and that means popular support for further violence probably isn’t going anywhere. You back down! No, you back down!
The result is that neither side is going to take real steps to deescalate, because both sides benefit from the conflict. That the Palestinians are suffering more, by orders of magnitude, doesn’t make either side’s position any less entrenched: Bibi wants to stay in power (and free), and Hamas wants to remain relevant and in power, and they’re more justified now than ever. Both regimes need to be replaced.
Thank you for this. That was a fantastic survey of some non-materialistic perspectives on consciousness. I have no idea what future research might reveal, but it’s refreshing to see that there are people who are both very interested in the questions and also committed to the scientific method.
True for the OP too. There’s definitely an element on some of the Lemmy communities that seems to exist only or at least primarily to push negative Biden prop (or barring that, anti-US prop in general). I checked Reddit recently for the first time in months (kind of like going to Walmart–avoid it like the plague, but sometimes you just can’t), and I was genuinely astonished at how little anti-Biden content was present by comparison.
I’m voting for Joe in November, and you should too. Joe’s administration killed non-competes, flipped the procedure for airline canceled and delayed flight refunds (i.e., pro-consumer), and pushed back the exempt employee loophole–and that’s just the news from this week. He’s an awesome president without even considering that the other side is composed entirely of criminals, Russian assets, and fascists.
Okay, I’ll bite. I own a house. Now suppose I buy another house. It’s empty. It’s not someone else’s home. Under the proposed rule (“you don’t get to own somebody else’s home”), I can’t rent the house-shaped building to someone as a residence. So now instead, I’m turning the second house into a pig farm and hiring laborers to raise and slaughter pigs on it, because the state insists that I have to put the land to work. [That’s what property tax is.]
I’m still profiting off of someone else’s labor, the would-be tenant is homeless, and I’m destroying a neighborhood. Somehow this doesn’t seem like a win to me–for anyone.
I am strongly in favor of protections for tenants: no one should be constructively evicted, rents should be controlled everywhere, and price-fixing by landlord cartels should result in prison sentences. BUT rental residences arise as a natural consequence of the freedom to contract. The solution to slumlords who fund entire generations of descendents by lucking into a valuable tower at the turn of the century is not “getting rid of landlords.” It’s just tax.
Full disclosure: I’m not a landlord, but I’ve both rented and am fortunate enough to own my own home now. I have also litigated both sides of evictions. I’ve seen bad landlords put the screws to impoverished tenants, and I’ve also seen spiteful tenants utterly destroy properties with essentially no recourse. This is not a problem you solve with magical thinking.
“Many” is the operative word there. It’s not all–not by a manure-covered mile. If you ever want to do a deep dive down a fun legislative rabbit-hole, dig into right-to-farm law, agricultural zoning, and the history of nuisance litigation. I might not be able to put a hog farm next to a tenement building downtown in a major metropolitan (or I might be surprised to find that, in fact, I can, if I’m willing to pony up for the land), but there are plenty of places where I could.
In any event, the example is ultimately hypothetical. The point is that trying to exterminate landlords can have disastrous knock-on effects, foreseen or otherwise.
Rant warning (that’s the end of the response; the rest is just venting about inequality).
It’s no accident that the American Dream is about owning land. Land ownership is central to our national identity, born as we are out of generations of homesteaders, tenant-farmers, explorers, slaves, and frontiersmen who rightly made no distinction between the tyranny of the plantation and that of the feudal lord (and that of the modern slumlord). Everyone wants land, and who can blame them? For a hundred-thousand years, owning land has been the best, most reliable route to prosperity and, ultimately, generational wealth.
The problem isn’t that landlords exist. It’s that landlords are rich. And notably, it’s absolutely not all of them. I don’t really have any beef with a professional who does well, retires, and buys a little summer house he rents out to vacationers eight months out of the year. The fact that it’s a profitable undertaking doesn’t really unravel the social fabric, since the profit motive is the only reason vacation homes exist for people (like me) who want them and have yet to save up enough to buy one outright.
Ultimately the problem is, as always, wealth disparity. A vacation home isn’t a big deal. A monopoly on an entire vacation community, however, is a different matter, because with it comes price fixing, capture of the local government, corruption, abuse, and all the worst consequences of gentrification–you know, capitalism. And again, it’s a problem you solve by taxing hoards of wealth, whether they’re in any individual’s pocket or hidden in a corporate offshore vault or securities labyrinth. It’s a problem we already solved a generation or two ago: Accumulate more wealth, pay more taxes, and continue to pay progressively more taxes until the profit motive is completely overshadowed by the societal benefit (via tax) of the new wealth generated. If you own a building in midtown Manhattan, you should get to pocket only the tiniest fraction of the rents it brings in. Not profitable enough? Then sell it. Plenty of the rest of us will stand in line to take it off your hands. Your corporation that hoovers up neighborhoods all over the country is suddenly in the red because a society-serving tax regime punishes you for said hoovering? Guess you better sell off some homes and watch the market correct itself.
All of that is to say that landlords serve an important function in an ordered society–providing the temporary use of otherwise unused land to persons who have not yet accumulated enough wealth to own their own land outright. We should not aspire to do away with that function, but rather simply to tax rent-seeking at a level that serves the society at large. It should be profitable to own a vacation home. It should never be profitable to own six.
Oh there are plenty of ways to make a property profitable. Selling it–which is both of the examples you offered–is one of the worst ways, however, and that’s why those fortunate enough to own land tend to pursue alternatives first. If you stop them from being able to rent by fiat, they’re not going to sell as a result. They’ll do something else profitable–and probably unsavory–instead.
A land contract is a sale. So is a private mortgage. I don’t want to be condescending here, but it’s not unreasonable to expect that you know what those terms mean when you use them as examples. Your regime also expects that the seller carry the note (which in every or almost every jurisdiction is how a land contract works now–it’s almost indistinguishable from a mortgage as a matter of law–and in any jurisdiction where I’m wrong about this, it’s worse for the buyer anyway). If the seller is put in a position where you’re trying to incentivize them to sell, demanding that they bear additional risk and cost isn’t going to do that. I also assume you understand that this scenario increases the likelihood that the seller is the one left holding the bag if the bad credit purchaser defaults. Is it fair to assume the purchaser has bad credit? Yes, because purchasers with excellent credit and assets can already buy property now.
Doubling property taxes doesn’t get you the result you want either. It just hurts the small owners, because property tax doesn’t care how many properties you own; it only cares about the property to which it’s attached. Large corporations don’t care about a doubled property tax, because they can just eat it and raise the rents. They’re already colluding to fix rents, and that’s the whole problem. Tax credit for an occupier? Terrific. We’ll put the CEO in the penthouse, put the rest of the C suite in our other penthouses downtown, and use the extra cash for stock buybacks.
What’s actually needed is a wealth tax. Don’t penalize someone for owning a nice house. Penalize them for owning thirty houses.
Now, I agree in principle that more people should be able to own land, and I also agree that the current situation in which land is being increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer ultra-rich entities is unsustainable (and heinous, besides). But the “if you’re currently a landlord, you should be forced to sell your property to whoever you might otherwise rent it to” just doesn’t work. You simply can’t make it attractive enough, because you can’t change the reality that most renters just can’t afford to buy the property. If they could, the problem wouldn’t exist. If I own valuable property, there’s no magic hand-waving you can do that is going to make me want to sell to someone who can’t afford it, because I know they can’t afford it! All putting their name on the deed does is ensure that the property gets sold when they default on the note, and whoever’s holding the note has to cry foreclosure (and guess what? That does cost money and labor to the mortgagee, since the defaulting buyer is probably bankrupt/judgment proof).
So I’ll just turn the place into a hog farm instead. Now instead of renting the house I inherited from the last generation to another family while I wait for my kids to grow up (a situation I expect to find myself in within the next decade or two), I’m instead going to find another way to make it valuable. There’s no universe in which I’m going to sell it. I feel like that kind of scenario accounts for a lot of the upper middle class in the next fifty years, all else being the same. Putting those folks in the same boat with the corporate landlords is shooting your agenda in the foot.
The hog farm is a hypothetical example. Getting hung up on it doesn’t change the reality that there are alternative uses of property that don’t require new zoning. In places where they don’t exist they will be made to exist, because people will sooner burn down their properties than give them away.
And you’re now suggesting that instead of renting, property owners should hold the notes on subprime mortgages? Your position is “If you’re creditworthy enough to own a second home, you should be forced to sell it to someone who can’t afford it and carry a note yourself at tremendous risk that an American bank knows better than to hold.” You were alive in 2008, right? You want a Depression? That’s how you get a Depression. When you find yourself advertising subprime mortgages in order to make your scheme work, don’t you think that might be a good time to reevaluate?
The seller isn’t holding the house when the buyer defaults. The seller is holding the house, the buyer’s damages to the house, the cost of the foreclosure, and the cost of deficiency litigation against the defaulting buyer who is probably judgment-proof, and that’s assuming the seller doesn’t also lose the house at foreclosure, since a foreclosure is a public sale. So the seller carries all of the risk while the unqualified buyer gets the equity. I don’t even own any land to rent, but fuck that. I’d sooner let it sit empty. The only people making money in that environment are real estate lawyers.
And none of this even considers that currently, a creditworthy seller statistically has given her own mortgage on the rental property in the first place, and that means the seller can’t finance the house herself because she can’t transfer good title to anyone without paying off her own note first. That’s a problem that doesn’t exist for, you guessed it, landlords. That scenario exists to currently enable people to buy second homes and generate wealth for their families, and it’s impossible in your regime in which apparently the upper middle class should not exist at all.
The bottom line is that your scheme is a disaster. I don’t say that to be mean. It’s just out of touch with economic reality. People can’t afford houses, and forcing landlords to sell their land doesn’t make people able to afford it. Credit and lending isn’t made up. It’s based on actual risk assessment, and forcing landlords to bear that risk while also losing their land isn’t a transfer of wealth to vulnerable populations or younger generations. It’s an erasure of wealth by procedure, bureaucracy, and waste.
And the owner-occupier thing? You know people can lie about their residency and building occupancy, right?
Your scheme, if implemented, would not solve the housing crisis. It targets the wrong people, it’s economically indefensible, and most importantly, it destroys class solidarity thay would otherwise exist between small landowners and renters. The only thing you might accomplish is a tremendous wave of violence, because I think I can speak for a lot of Americans here:
I have been tremendously, exceedingly fortunate and privileged to buy land. I wish everyone were so fortunate. I worked very hard for it. Other members of my family have also, and as much as I dread it, eventually I may inherit a second home that has been in my family for generations and was paid for by decades of backbreaking labor by my ancestors. When that day comes, I may rent one of these properties until my son is old enough to live there with his family. That’s the entirety of my retirement and investment strategy. My savings will simply not be enough on their own.
And your scheme suggests instead that I should be forced to sell to someone who may well fail to pay for it. No thanks. That’s a nonstarter, and it’s a nonstarter for everyone whose story even remotely resembles mine. In my part of the world, that’s the story of every house in the county. Your scheme doesn’t work for the simple reason that people here would sooner overthrow the government than let it stand.
I will never deed these properties away. They are paid for with my family’s blood. If you want to take the land from me or anyone similarly situated, you’re going to have to do it with guns.
That’s an attitude that can only exist for small landowners. Maybe we should try a scheme that doesn’t put them on the same footing with institutional investors. I really don’t like being on the same side of an issue as an investment bank. --but I like it a lot more than your plan to set the middle class back a hundred years.
Apparently, it’s rare for lawyers to draw objections during their opening statements, but it happened twice for Trump’s team today and the judge sustained both objections....
To clarify: In jury nullification the verdict doesn’t get nullified. The law does. The scenario of jury nullification involves a guilty defendant going free due to the juror’s principles–and it’s immaterial whether those principles are founded in reason, truth, morality, sound jurisprudence, or sanity.
“We rely in South Dakota on the fact that I am pro-life and we have a law that says there is an exception for the life of the mother, and I just don’t believe that a tragedy should perpetuate another tragedy.”
If Trump wins and she’s his running mate, it’s statistically more likely than not that she’ll be president.
The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial ordered the media on Thursday not to report on where potential jurors have worked and to be careful about revealing information about those who will sit in judgment of the former president....
Long is the list of jailed and dead ordinary people who wrongly assumed that by association with the privileged class they would enjoy the same immunities.
Trump may die a free man despite his crimes, but journalists are working people.
A lot of us have noticed that Trump gets away with things that normal people would not, and that’s not an accident. Trump can run his mouth about everyone forever, and he may never be held to account–and there are a lot of sometimes complicated reasons for that–but the same privilege absolutely does not apply to courtroom field reporters.
If I were covering this trial, I’d violate the court’s instructions at my own peril.
That certainly does not mean that some folks won’t be pressured to violate the order to save their livelihoods, but I would expect no less than swift and heavy consequences for people who anger the court and whose names aren’t Trump.
Happens Too Frequently (infosec.pub)
Celebrating the 20th birthday of City of Heroes: an MMO resurrected by the people who loved it enough to 'bring the game back for good' (www.pcgamer.com)
The Tech Robber Baron who wants to take over San Francisco (newrepublic.com)
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly...
Team Trump Is Ready to Lose the Supreme Court Immunity Case. They're Celebrating (www.rollingstone.com)
Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won....
House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away from Americans (theintercept.com)
Civil liberties groups are raising alarms about a bill making its way through Congress that applies pressure for a ban on travel to Iran for Americans using U.S. passports. The rights groups see the bill as part of a growing attempt to control the travel of American citizens and bar Iranian Americans in particular from...
New York appeals court overturns Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction from landmark #MeToo trial (apnews.com)
Finally beat cancer (sh.itjust.works)
Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established (apnews.com)
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
"I want to live forever in AI" (lemmy.ml)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/14869314...
Airlines will soon have to pay you back if they cancel or delay your flight (www.theverge.com)
Bat Fact: Bats have been around for 50 million years (lemmy.world)
62 percent of Biden voters want to replace both candidates on the ballot: Poll (www.thehill.com)
Maybe someday we will find our way (lemmy.world)
An eternal style (lemmy.world)
Get rid of landlords... (lemmy.world)
Pessimism growing in Trump's inner circle that a hush money guilty verdict is inevitable (www.rawstory.com)
Apparently, it’s rare for lawyers to draw objections during their opening statements, but it happened twice for Trump’s team today and the judge sustained both objections....
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem says no exceptions for rape or incest in abortion ban (www.independent.co.uk)
Post Roe v Wade abortion law in South Dakota only allows for exceptions to save life of mother...
Judge in Trump case orders media not to report where potential jurors work (apnews.com)
The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial ordered the media on Thursday not to report on where potential jurors have worked and to be careful about revealing information about those who will sit in judgment of the former president....
Unexpected Red Guest (image.civitai.com)
(LEOSAM) (2024)...
Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits (www.nola.com)