Rov_Scam
1d ago
I think the bigger deterrent is that there's simply no reason for anyone to participate in such a scheme. I neither live in Fenwick Island nor own property there, and as a consequence, I do not care about who sits in local government offices. I doubt you care either. Someone may theoretically be able to hatch a scheme where they subdivide their property a thousand ways and give votes to 999 people who otherwise wouldn't be able to vote, and structure the transactions so that these minority owners wouldn't have any rights to the property that would prejudice the controlling owner, but I don't know how I could be induced to participate. Rental income split that many ways isn't much of an inducement. If a property rents for $10,000/week on average, which is generous considering that in the off season there are likely going to be several weeks where it doesn't rent at all, and half of that income goes to the rental company and to pay taxes and maintenance costs, a 1/1000 owner is getting about $5/week. If it's not being rented, try coordinating use with 1,000 other people. In exchange for that $5/week and the right to vote in local elections, you're taking on liability.
Of course, you're not actually going to get that $5/week, because no rental company is going to agree to leasing a property with a thousand owners, and no insurance company is going to underwrite such a property. Even if it's vacant property, and the controlling owner agrees to pay the property taxes, what do you do if he doesn't pay? The taxing authority doesn't give a shit about your agreement, so you'd better be prepared to pay the taxes yourself and sue him for reimbursement. What do you do if someone injures themself on your uninsurable property and sues you?
Getting to your concerns, though, even if somebody did that and somehow found thousands of participants, why would someone structure a transaction for the sole purpose of giving votes to out-of-towners? It would certainly look like the controlling owner was giving these shares away under the presumption that the minority owners would vote for his preferred candidate, at which point one wonders if any other inducements were used to encourage participation, which makes it look less like a real estate deal and more like a sophisticated form of electoral fraud, in which case having the registrations invalidated would be the least of their concerns. One expects that even if the registrations are allowed to stand, such a scheme would only invite an investigation from the attorney general before the first vote is even cast. I am not willing to subject myself to such an investigation and possible prosecution for the privilege of being able to vote for Fenwick Island town council or whatever, and I doubt most other people would be willing to either.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Partitions are generally governed by the common law of property. The act you cite is a relatively recent reform that has only been adopted in about half the states and only applies in specific situations. One unfortunately common issue, particularly among lower income populations, is when a property owner dies and no estate is opened, and the property they own simply continues to be occupied by whatever family members happen to occupy it. After a few generations, some long lost relative finds out they own an interest and files a partition suit, whereby the property is sold at a cash auction for less than market value, often to an investor, with the result often being that someone who has been living in the house a long time finds themselves dispossessed. The model act is intended to keep the property in the family by allowing an heir to purchase at market value in a normal transaction, which has the side effect of preserving the full value of the property.
From what I cal tell three states have applied this process to all partition actions, but Delaware never enacted the model legislation to begin with. And from what I can tell, it's unlikely that any additional states will, because there's some controversy over how effective the legislation is. One unintended side effect is that all of the additional safeguards have added expense to the process, which was already expensive to begin with.
Generally speaking, you need to be careful when relying on model uniform legislation. Some things, like the Uniform Commercial Code, have been adopted nearly universally and can be cited chapter and verse without too much concern of running afoul of some local variation. Others, like the Uniform Probate Code, have only been adopted by a minority of states, with reforms being incorporated piecemeal in others. And then there are cases like the Model Penal Code, which is considered successful model legislation since the spirit of the reforms have been adopted, but the actual legislation varies widely among jurisdictions, with no state that I'm aware of adopting the actual statutory language.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
And what's the motivation for the majority owner to do this? He'd be giving equal access to the property to 9999 other people while being prepared to do unilateral maintenance, and if they don't contribute he's going to pay a 5-figure sum to conduct a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder. So he can...give his friends votes for the Fenwick Island town council? If I'm one of the 9999 I'm there to get access to the property and I could probably care less about some local election.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It wouldn't be practicable. The more people who own a piece of property, the harder it gets to make decisions about the property, and get the owners to contribute money for upkeep. A dispute would inevitably develop, and the result would be that one of the owners files a partition action and the whole property is sold.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
You can slice statistics any way you want, it just depends on what factors you actually care about. The black vs. white disparity is about the same as the male vs. female disparity, but I doubt you'd recommend the alternative scenario where we say that guns and men don't mix well.
None of the articles you linked to said that prosecution was still being deferred under the diversion program for the 2021 offenses. I checked the docket, and it looks like he was convicted and sentenced under them, so I'm not sure what the point of this post is. He got into a diversion program, failed, and was sentenced to jail.
Edit: The sentencing guidelines, assuming all the enhancements I think might apply actually do apply, call for 17â34 months, at least some of which would be jail time. The docket shows that when he was granted HYTA status he was given credit for 532 days he served in jail while waiting trial and sentenced to an additional 3 years of probation. When you take the sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender into consideration the sentence doesn't look unreasonable, and even if I underestimated the sentence it still isn't unreasonable when you take into consideration the possibility of a plea to lesser charges. It's not clear to me that going to trial would have resulted in a more substantial punishment, and he probably would have been released for time served in any event. The only advantage he got was the opportunity to escape without a record if he completed his probation, and if he were able to do that then nobody would have any problem with the outcome.
Since he could barely make it 3 months without committing another crime, the judge revoked his HYTA status, meaning the prior convictions go on his record, and they didn't have to arraign him for months because they were holding him on the probation violation. He was remanded to custody following his second arraignment, and eventually plead guilty to the 2021 charges.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
If American workers are only 20% of the population (and the 80% are people actually looking for work, not children, retirees, housewives, etc.), then I don't think normal political considerations will matter much.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I'm not sure that this is entirely true. Very low-skilled people are unemployable period, and lowering the pay rate doesn't do anything. For example, there's a guy I know who isn't the brightest, retired now but comes off as someone who was definitely in special education back in the 60s and 70s. He worked as a janitor at a local elementary school. In Pennsylvania the minimum wage is the Federal $7.25. Someone in his position would be making $22.62 this yer and $24.35 next year. Of course, that's because he's been there for 35 years, but even a new hire makes $16.60 on the current contract and $18.60 on the next. Grocery, retail, and fast food wages aren't much lower, even for 16-year-olds with no experience. The only exceptions I'm aware of are for people with disabilities, but that's more because they can only make so much before they lose their benefits. I don't think there is a significant population that's employable but for minimum wage laws.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I understand what you're saying, but that feeds into my point: If an industry is going gangbusters companies can't be too picky about who they hire. I saw it myself when I was doing oil and gas titles; some attorneys would be the kind who would go into excruciating detail about every possible title defect and track down every piece of supporting documentation. Others would slap something together that vaguely resembled a title report and required substantial modification to turn into anything we could submit to a client. Everyone starts off in the second category, but when the industry is hot, we were willing to tolerate a lot more people like that because it was cheaper to correct their work and hope they got better than it was to turn down business due to lack of staff. When the industry's in a slump, even the first type of employee will have a hard time finding work. The difference is that the energy industry has no problem admitting when it's in a slump, and will openly state that as a reason they had to lay a bunch of people off. They don't try to bullshit investors to make them think it's about efficiency, because anyone can look at the price of oil. Tech companies can't seem to admit that demand for their products may be declining. Or that advertising and data harvesting for free products aren't as valuable as they thought.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Having incorporated the rest of your comments to get an idea of what you are looking for, I think I may have a solution for you. A few preliminary items:
- I'm assuming that when you say "Colonial" you are referring to what is known as "Colonial Revival", which is a 20th century update of the Georgian and Federal styles that were popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Basically, I'm assuming you aren't referring to French Colonial, or Spanish Colonial, or Dutch Colonial, or any of the other "Colonial" styles which may exist in North America.
- As a 20th century American style, this type of house would have no need for a mudroom per se. Most of these were built in auto-centric suburbs beginning in the 1920s, meaning the front door would not be used much. Early examples of this style were mostly built in more upscale neighborhoods, and once it became more common after World War II most people would have had a car. Prewar suburbs with these houses would have likely had detached garages behind the house, and later examples would have had attached garages. In Pittsburgh, the terrain is hilly and the garage is usually integral and opens into the basement. What I'm getting at is that the home's occupant's wouldn't normally use the front door, so a mudroom would be built in the back, off the garage, or it would have an unfinished basement to use for that purpose.
- Despite the ever-ballooning American house size, the dimensions you've proposed aren't modest. I don't use foreign units without conversion so you'll have to bear with me here, but 100 sq. meters is about 1076 sq. feet. Since this is a two-story house, doubling that gets you to 2152 sq. ft., which is plenty big.
To give an example to tie it all together, this is a 5-bay Colonial Revival home in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was built in 1968 by Bryan, who is a reputable local builder that mostly focuses on custom homes these days but was doing tract houses in the 1960s and 1970s (not to be confused with Ryan Homes, a national developer of tract houses that's been building junk since at least the 1970s). The total area is 1890 sq. ft., though the footprint is only 875 as the second story slightly overhangs on both sides. It has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths. You will notice that the driveway goes down the hill behind the house and the garage is integrated into the basement. Ignore the assymetrical front layout. Here's a more upscale example from 1910. While it precedes the era of widespread automobile ownership, at 6900 square feet, it owner would have probably had a car, or at least a horse. [Note how the driveway leads to a carriage house in the rear [https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4513598,-79.9114955,3a,24.5y,311.56h,95.08t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s_vxsZmkSMf0FSWoXMHGrIw!2e0!5s20220901T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-5.0819782887585205%26panoid%3D_vxsZmkSMf0FSWoXMHGrIw%26yaw%3D311.55661009264486!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D]. The owner would not have entered through the front door.
I initially intended to tell you that your problem was hopeless if you wished to remain architecturally correct, so I consulted The Bible, namely Virginia Savage McAlester's indispensible A Field Guide to American Houses and consulted the sections on Colonial Revival, Georgian, and Federal houses. What I discovered was that, contrary to my mental image of a colonial house, there is a rare variation with a centered gable. While these gables are usually small, and may not protrude from the central mass at all, it would be possible to bump this out and create a large enough area for a mud room. Unfortunately, since, per the book, this occurs in fewer than 5% of Colonial Revival houses and 10% of Georgian and Federal houses, it's hard to find pictures, and bump-outs of sufficient size are less common still. But I don't see why it couldn't be done. This House only bumps out slightly, but you could extend this by 5 feet or so and get a small mud room out of it. Some people build small mudrooms on their houses and they always look tacked-on, but with a central gable running all the way up it would be an integral part of the house, and from there you could just use a standard floor plan.
Beyond this, I don't see why there would be a problem with the stairs. Every house like this I've been in (and I can almost guarantee the layout of the first example) has the stairwell in the center of the house. Basically you'd walk in and there would be an entryway with a foyer leading down the center of the house to the kitchen in the back, with the stairwell running parallel on whichever side you want. To the right there's a family room, and to the left a living room and dining room. You can sacrifice some family room space for a half bath or hide one under the stairs. These houses almost always have four bedrooms.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
As an architecture fan I'd be interested if you could find any pictures of what you're describing, and if you're really generous letting me feel free to use those terms if I find them apt. Especially since I'm guessing the "Wright Style" has only the most superficial resemblance to anything actually designed by Wright.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I think it's more that the tech industry feels that normal growth is unacceptable and that the massive growth of the 80s and 90s is what's to be expected. They can't come to grips with being a mature, boring industry that makes incremental advancements; there aren't any 25-year-old multimillionaires who made their fortune starting a construction machinery company out of their bedroom. So when the industry starts contracting, it can't be because their growth projections were overoptimistic, but because they're actually doing a lot better! Their products are so advanced that they don't need employees anymore, and your job is next, even if they don't know what that job is. I don't think it's a coincidence that LLM hype coincides with tech employment peaking.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I'm talking about realistic configurations, not theoretical ones where you use office furniture in the living room and people always keep doors closed.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
which, being immovable, needlessly constrain the rearrangement of furniture
And yet you design floor plans that only allow for one reasonable arrangement of furniture, if that
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Since you've evidently blocked me for some reason, you won't see this, but your framing of the matter is rather boo-outgroup. Nonetheless, I don't think this is going to have much of an effect on anything. There's literally nothing this report could have contained that would have stopped critics of the party cold, so everyone sees what they want to see. Critics of the party were certain that it said bad things about Biden's senility and Kamala's incompetence and that they didn't want the report to get out because it would be too devastating. Instead it turns out that the report wasn't released because it was so poorly done the guy who wrote it got fired. It will make Ken Martin look bad to both people who know who Ken Martin is for about 2 days until Trump audibly farts on camera and the nation's attention moves elsewhere. By the time people start announcing their candidacies it will have about as much relevance as that time Amy Klobuchar allegedly threw a salad at an aide.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The issue that led to the Jones awards being so high was his refusal to participate in the process in good faith. He ignored the suit rather than defend it and got a default judgment against him, and when the case went to trial for damages he played games with regard to discovery. If the jury thinks you aren't taking things seriously and are trying to hide assets, they're going to punish you for it, and there's nothing you can do about it, because the time to do something about it was before you got soaked.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The county isn't paying these settlements out of the treasury; they have insurance for that. I don't know the exact dynamics between the carriers and the government regarding how much caution they can make them exercise, but if they keep engaging in similar behavior rates will go up. These settlements are rare though even in the worst municipalities, so I don't see it being that much of an issue.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I think we just have different conceptions of what counts as escalation. The point of such a suit isn't to punish people for supporting Trump, but to make the United States whole. It's my opinion that this collusion has perpetrated a massive fraud on the United States, and that condoning this behavior will be more escalatory, because it acts as an implicit license for anyone to do it. So there are three options. The first is the one that I would consider the most escalatory, which is that the government would cede the legality of Trump's actions. Then, when they can't get an appropriation from congress, the president will just sue the government and instruct the attorney general to settle for however much money he's asking for. Then he can establish his own execitive agencies or NGOs to act as a shadow bureaucracy that distribute the benefits for purely political reasons. I don't think either one of us believe that this would be perfectly legal or constitutional for any administration to do, regardless of whether or not you can find some caselaw that specifically prohibits it. The second option is closer to what I think you would consider the deescalatory option which would be to let Trump off the hook, and then get congress to pass a law specifically prohibiting it.
The problem with this approach is that it suggests that Trump's above the law. Consider the following example: Suppose I come up with a novel fraudulent scheme, the result of which is that you lose a significant sum of money. You approach the district attorney, who tells you that based on the general principles of fraud what I did was probably illegal, and he has good arguments, but since there's nothing on-point regarding this specific scheme, he's not going to prosecute. He recommends that you write your congressman. This is especially bad in Trump's case because you're effectively saying that a government that will claw back an extra $50 bucks they overpaid Uncle Milt in his SS check will let 1.8 billion in theft slide because Donald Trump is a political figure and they don't want to escalate. The third option is that you litigate under the theory that what Trump did was illegal and you're simply restoring the status quo. Trump is certainly wealthy enough to cover the legal defenses of everyone involved, but we all know the chances of that happening.
BTW, I apologize for not answering your question the previous times you ask it, but if I get busy and don't look at it a while I'll forget what I was talking about and it will take an inordinate amount of time to retrace my steps. To answer your question, no, there is no precedent saying that, and there is actually precedent saying the opposite. But part of the point I am trying to make about the law, that non-litigators don't always understand, is that there are requirements and then there are requirements. Legally speaking, no, the case will not be dismissed. But just because a case survives dismissal doesn't mean that it's good enough to take to a jury, and for a fraud case such as this you will realistically need to show a victim. The cases that say you don't need a victim are ones where the defendants were so obviously involved in a fraudulent scheme that there was no question that they were trying to mislead people. The SPLC fraud allegations are so remote that it's harder to make that argument. To give you an example from what I do, I represent defendants. Theoretically, I don't have to prove anything, just show that the plaintiff didn't prove his case. But realistically I am not going to win if I don't present evidence. Even if a witness doesn't say something in his deposition, I'm going to ask about it anyway, because counsel will take the stance that since he didn't specifically deny it he's going to assume it's true, and I'm more worried about convincing counsel than convincing a jury.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Any schmuck can vote for uncontroversial things.
Any schmuck can vote for them, sure. But actually trying to accomplish uncontroversial things takes work, and the people you describe as fighters seem to have an allergy to doing anything that doesn't get their name in the newspaper. It takes actual work to prepare draft legislation and work with other lawmakers to get it passed. It takes actual work to drive out to a constituent's house to look at a road that he says is collapsing, and then drive to the PennDOT office and get up someone's ass about getting it fixed. Instead you want someone who will go down to Charleroi and tell all the fentanyl addicts that they're the Real Americans and that you want all the dirty jigs with the chutzpah to show up to their jobs every day, pay taxes, and open up businesses in a town without a lot going on out of there for good, even though, as State Senator, your power to actually effect such an outcome is close to zero.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Yeah but Scott engaged in a healthy amount of Medicaid fraud too. A white guy who manages to run what looks like a legitimate hospital network is always going to get the benefit of the doubt over a black immigrant whose entire operation can be portrayed as fraudulent.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
There were no ballot measures. This is Pennsylvania and when we do get ballot measures, they're usually pretty boring. (Do you support the ability of the Bubb County Joint Authority to reduce the hearing notice period from 30 days to 20 days provided the notice is advertised in both print and digital media?)
Rov_Scam
9d ago
As I said earlier, you're putting too much credence in the idea that the presence or absence of a case that fits some exact criteria is going to be some kind of showstopper for one side or the other. The entire issue is incredibly complicated and I'm not claiming that this is a slam dunk, just that there's a credible enough argument that this isn't going to get dismissed outright and that anyone who accepts money from this organization needs to be on alert that litigation is likely and they may end up getting tied up in it and eventually forced to pay the money back. What we have here is a settlement that seems to violate various basic ethical canons and raises significant constitutional questions, and the policy implications of this going forward could be wide ranging. So while I'm not necessarily saying the people who receive the money won't eventually win, you can certainly expect that a future administration will protect its interests, and their arguments won't be unreasonable.
To be clear, my endorsement of primogeniture was sarcastic, but anyway...
Any time you're contemplating a situation like this, you have to consider whether something is worth paying a large amount of money in hopes of getting a larger amount, or paying a small amount of money to be rid of the thing entirely, and this looks like one of the latter cases. I am not your lawyer, nor am I licensed in USVI, but I've done partitions before, and they are not a quick, easy process. What you describe is even more expensive because the division goes back 50 years and we don't even know what kind of title your grandfather had when he died. I know you seem pretty sure of who owns what, but 40 years is a long time, and you've already alluded to the possibility of an unrecorded transaction, which means that if I'm handling this the first thing I'm doing is a title search to make sure that I don't leave anyone out of the suit or misstate the interests, which could make things more expensive or even get the case dismissed. And that's before you can even file.
You're probably looking at a retainer somewhere in the 5kâ10k range just to get a suit started, though since it's an heirs property you're probably looking at the higher end of that range. This is all out of pocket before you've recovered any money from the property. If someone, say the half-brother living in the house, decides to contest the partition, it could cost several times more than that. If your lawyer wants to take a deposition, that's a few grand right there. If the opponent's lawyer wants to depose your mother, they'll just send a notice telling her to appear at the Hampton Inn in Charlotte Amelie on October 9. Sure, you can get it rescheduled to be taken remotely, but you will still get billed for the rescheduling, and billed again for a copy of the transcript. The key thing here is that the distribution of the proceeds isn't a straight "1/6 ownership gets 1/6 the money", but an equitable distribution. What's equitable? The court will appoint a master to decide. He will charge for this service.
Realistically, if nothing else, somebody has been paying property tax on this house, and that person is entitled to credit for the amount they paid. If the half-brother has done necessary repairs, he's entitled to credit for them. You can argue over what repairs are necessary. You can argue over whether he has sufficient proof. You can argue over a lot of things. You will be charged for this service. And unless you can convince the brother to move out prior to listing the house, the market value is practically zero, since nobody is going to pay fair market value for a property that requires an ejectment action to get possession. There was some talk yesterday about how difficult evictions have become in some places, but trust me, they're a breeze compared to ejectments. Obstinate tenants can hold up evictions, sure, but the process is designed to be streamlined, and a diligent landlord can get the guy out within a couple months. The ejectment process is not streamlined and operates on the same schedule as any other lawsuit, meaning you need to hire a lawyer, conduct discovery, have pretrial conferences, etc. It's no 15 day notice then off to the magistrate.
At this point you may be thinking "That's not going to happen. My family gets along, and the half-brother has no case and no money to fight it, and he'll leave well in advance of the judgment if the house is sold." To which I say "Great! You don't need to file a partition!" If you were to come to my office with your situation I'd tell you that for a small fraction of the cost of a partition I could draw up a sale agreement and if you could get everyone to sign it we'd list the property. The buyer can worry about the title. And if you can't get everyone to agree on that, then you can be assured that a partition is going to be a long, expensive endeavor for everyone involved. Based on the value of the property and the number of shares, a contested partition action is likely to cost your mother more money than she could expect to make from the sale. If I were in her shoes and those were the options I'd offer to convey my interest via quitclaim deed to anyone willing to pay for drafting and recording fees, and disclaim any interest from your grandmother's inheritance. It's much easier that way.
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