adebtlawyer

It is possible to be denied a bank account based on overdrafting and abandoning prior accounts. This is not based on credit score with one of the 'big three' agencies, but another agency called Chexsystems that only deals with your conduct towards your bank accounts. Poor people frequently have this problem - an old overdrafted account prevents them from getting another one, even at a different bank.

The gag is that you'd think $11,000 would be enough to fix this problem. Usually people who have it couldn't put a few hundred together to close out the old account.

They could exist without protection from the legal system, but to the extent that they are protected by courts, they are a legal construct. In the US, there is more to them than 'things you aren't telling anyone' and you are not necessarily without legal remedy if someone finds out your trade secret.

Yeah with only $11,000 he'd probably get hit with all kinds of fees if he tried to open a bank account. And forget about checks, you can't even write a check that big.

I'm not saying the cash was evidence of wrongdoing, but the elaborate excuses this thread is making for this guy's behavior are only highlighting how absurd it was.

> their rental income is usually taxed at a lower rate than ordinary earnings.

Not in the US. Rental income is income. I think you may be referring to deductions, which exist, but are not nearly as advantageous as taxing rental income at a lower rate outright.

Zoning won't allow it - the suburbs are not built up intentionally.

No. Military service is still an option. The education benefits are excellent.

I'm not familiar with Alice. As far as I know, you're right, non-obviousness is different than patentable subject matter. Sorry to elide them together like that.

I never claimed to be patent lawyer.

I said 'in-house.' That means lawyers on staff on salaries, not fees to outside counsel.

Work costs money, sure, but I'm skeptical of 'millions of dollars.'

> It costs millions of dollars to run these operations

Are you sure? Litigation isn't always expensive if you're doing it in-house.

No. You usually can't pick judges unless the forum is so tiny they only have one. You can't pick the forum unless it has jurisdiction over the matter.

The key word is 'routine.' Patentable subject matter is supposed to be non-obvious, in other words, innovative.

> I'm sure most public defenders are marvelous public servants.

Why? The horrible pay and insane workloads don't attract bright people.

Your statement "other evidence to meet balance of probabilities" is concise but so abstract it's useless. Like most legal questions, there is no abstract way to reason about this. The answer is always "it depends on the context."

In my experience, it's not unusual, though not common, for people (usually parties) to refuse to testify in a civil case based on the 5th amendment. The other side can ask the court to draw an adverse inference from this. I know an aggressive litigator who sometimes has his clients do this. He says "you won't win your case with your adverse inference."

That may be true, but the 5th amendment seems like a risky civil strategy to me. Usually the other side won't be entirely dependent on your testimony to prove their case. There can be other evidence out there that you might want to explain with your testimony, or you may otherwise wish to make your case with testimony.

It's worth knowing that in a civil case the 5th amendment is much less powerful and has risks as well as benefits.

I have reason to think oral statements about your financial condition aren't actionable as fraud by your creditors in bankruptcy. I know nothing of liability to investors, securities law, etc.

Once I reached my 30's, not being able to fall asleep wasn't a problem for me anymore. YMMV.

Maybe, if there's anybody to buy it. It may be abandoned.

1. Of course it wasn't cyber squatting. Cyber squatting is unlawful in the U.S. and would have lead to a different outcome.

2. Why wasn't there a settlement? I assume either Mr. Nissan didn't want to sell the domains at any price (unlikely but possible) or insisted Nissan pay eleventy bajillion dollars for them, leaving Nissan with court as their best option.

What country is that? Sure isn't the U.S.

The US system is also supposed to be a process of truth-finding, just that we leave the parties to support their own positions as adversaries. Without advocacy, American courts do very little on their own. So far that doesn't bother me, but I'm a lawyer. For someone thrown into the system, there can be an incorrect expectation that the court will automatically act to do justice.

Having litigated against adversaries who use the courts primarily to be a nuisance, with little or no regard to the actual strength or weakness of their claims, I've become convinced "loser pays costs and attorney's fees of prevailing party" is a better system than what we have in the U.S.

Doing stupid things is common in the small business world. For example, I regularly run across people who have no personal bank account and just use the company account for everything. In practice, there is almost always something about how things are run (particularly with a failing company) that is actionably questionable and pulls the owner personally into the suit.

A corporation isn't a magic shield. The limited liability exists mostly to allow investors to own stock in large enterprises without being exposed to more liability than the value of their shares.

Trump is/was doing multimillion dollar real estate development with outside investor's money, and observing lots of corporate formalities. That's why his businesses could go bankrupt without wiping him out.

If I represent a creditor, I'm not going to care if your chickenshit small business is incorporated or not, particularly if it's just a professional services business like a consultant. I'll just sue you AND your corporation. Besides, most creditors that loan to small businesses demand personal guarantees from the owners.

Just having a corporation won't make you Donald Trump. But it might earn your tax preparer some fees.

> The US is one of the few developed nations that has been busy paying down household debt for the last five years.

In the US, the people with the highest debt-to-income ratios have been briskly filing for bankruptcy over the last five years. I wish I had time to dig up another graph to match yours, volume of personal bankruptcy filings over the same period. It's correlated. It's also a much stronger effect than paying down, often someone with over 100% debt-to-income goes to 0% over a matter of months, with no change in income at all.

People rarely think of this in advance, but joint debts of any kind usually become a problem in divorce. One former spouse will stop paying and ruin the other spouse's credit, to say nothing of causing foreclosures. It doesn't matter what the family court orders (this spouse will pay that debt, etc), because that won't change the underlying obligation as far as the creditor is concerned.

Joint credit cards, which aren't attached to any asset, don't have much benefit compared to this downside. What people are typically told is happening is that the credit card still 'belongs' to one spouse, but the other will be also authorized to 'use' it. While this is possible, the paperwork presented to sign often makes the other spouse jointly liable for the debt instead. I'm convinced even the bank representatives don't know they are setting up things this way and are just following a script. You have to read the paperwork to see what it does.

For longer, drier background reading, recommend "This Time It's Different." One key insight the researchers shared was that outright defaults (complete failure to repay) on sovereign debt are rare. The Soviets did it on the Tsar's debt, but usually what happens is that repayment is delayed. My guess is that Greece will do that rather than switching currencies. The exact terms depend on what their creditors will allow, but their creditors have a lot to lose from failure to reach agreement, too.

Legal licensing does not keep incompetent practitioners from entering the industry, at least in the U.S. This is cultural - there is still an expectation that after you get your license, other lawyers will train you.

Generally, no, it can't. Mortgages are contracts. By their typical contract terms, the lender can't foreclose unless the borrower is in breach of the contract. That means falling behind on payments. Could you write a custom mortgage to allow the lender to foreclose anyway? Sure, but then the problem is whether it would be securitizable or in compliance with local law. Unlikely, thus, a bank would not do that. The average mortgage and note are form contracts with some variation, but not this 'steal your house' term.

Parent post also implies that during the foreclosure crisis the value of houses increased. The opposite occurred.

Get a lawyer. You can sue them under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). That is the primary recourse you have, not customer service.

I should have said, do these jobs more efficiently. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see how a machine that does a "sizable portion" of the work would ever be good enough to be worth using. A human expert would always be needed to check the work.

If the proposition is that this would lead to fewer humans being needed for these jobs, I suppose that could be the case. In my own field, my criticism of automating, say, legal research and writing, is that the time it would take for me to check the work would be nearly the same as doing it myself. I don't see much efficiency gain, which is why I think the only thing that would truly be better than a human would be an AGI.