Okay, this is funny.
For background, start by reading the older entry about one of my junk fax cases, in which one of the defendants turned out to be a sore loser. Now, consider; each of the three people involved paid $250. On September 19, 2003. Fast-forward to March 24, 2005, when the same guy posts two comments on the blog. They are:
this is great. i just stumbled on it.
Posted by: zach roux at March 24, 2005 02:41 PM
do you still have that plush office in st paul. i was really impressed when i walked in. looks like you have a very successful practice.
Posted by: zach roux at March 24, 2005 02:47 PM
Wow. Think about it. That's over a year and a half. That much time has passed, and he's still bitter. Over $250. He's bitter about this. Does he blame the sleazebags who took him and his buddies for thousands of bucks? Does he blame the greed that made him buy into a badly run scam? No. He blames me, because I'm weird.
But it gets funnier. So, I figure, hey, $250, whatever, it's not enough money to be worth keeping someone up late at night cursing an uncaring universe. I send him an email saying that if he wants his $250 back, he can have it.
I get this:
Hey,I don't want the money but my buddy elided could sure use it he just bought a new lexus.
Here is his address
elided
(The name was one of the other folks who settled with us, and a street address was provided.)
The humor here is, so far as I can tell, totally unintentional. I don't think he gets it. I don't think he realizes that the reason Steve has a cheap little office is that he's doing consumer protection law, because it's worth doing. I don't think he realizes that not everyone would want a new lexus; that we are not all trying to accumulate status symbols to make people respect us.
Here's the mystery. This guy, apparently, makes over $250 in an afternoon, so we figure he's making solidly over $120k a year, probably more since his business is successful. He's obviously not short of money. He's got it all.
So why is it that I'm the one who's happy? It's not just that I scored some kind of victory. I'd forgotten about these people until I was doing the accounting for my ethical money laundering scheme. It's not that $250 even matters. It's that he's subscribed to the System; if you make more money and are successful, you win. You need to "pick up girls". Sheesh; I just had my 10th anniversary. What do I want with picking up girls?
This is the ultimate culture clash. The things I believe in are just indistinct buzzing noises to him. The things he's concerned with are just buzzing noises to me. About all I can remember about Lexus is that they make really expensive cars. Pure status symbol. And to add irony, he's bragging about a friend's status symbol; I'm not even sure that makes sense.
Anyway, he didn't want the money, but he's still bitter about losing it. Not much to be done.
Remember, folks. Money isn't that big a deal. Don't let yourself get too caught up in it; it'll make you bitter and ironic.
There's a forum at Christian Forums called "Marriage Ministry". The advice given ranges from brilliant analysis of the needs and beliefs of those involved, to painfully inappropriate pat answers, to platitudes that may or may not even suggest a potential relevance to a poster's question.
If your marriage isn't quite the American Dream, you will find no comfort here. The people giving advice often come across as playing house with Ken and Barbie. The number one problem faced seems to be the terrifying possibility that a man might look at pictures of naked women. Apparently, some horrifyingly dysfunctional people might enjoy this. The kinds of questions the people I know have faced in their marriages are not at issue. We see no wrestling with what vows mean, or how to deal with a sick or dying loved one. We don't see people talking about dealing with taxes together, or spending problems, or wanting to move to another state; instead, we have five or ten pages of reassurances that your husband is essentially cheating on you by having female friends.
The very thought of talking about a spouse's struggles with, say, being bisexual or gay, or transgendered, produces nervous laughter. The advice given would go straigh past "bad" into "offensive and cruel". Oh, your spouse isn't Christian? Into the "unequally yoked" ghetto you go, where you sit around with other people who have never in two thousand years wondered what the word "unequally" was doing there, if Paul meant to say "do not be yoked with unbelievers".
Needless to say, attacks on spouses are fairly common, and tend to be made without regard for the dim and distant possibility that a married person might care about his or her spouse, and take it personally. Oh, and by the way, broken bones are not an excuse to move out in this forum; you should just be properly submissive.
It's not all this bad, but the bad is deeply ingrained.
You can either laugh, or cry. Or both. The best way to do both is to get stinking drunk, and that implies a drinking game.
deviantART admins demand people stop talking about art theft -- note that the page has several screens worth of solid evidence of willful art theft, which is apparently too abstract for the dA admins to comprehend.
The funny part here is that they're letting a well-documented art thief continue breaking international copyright law, using their site, but calling the people talking about it names; in fact, there's more name-calling going on in the admin note than there is in the journal entry complained about.
In short, DeviantART doesn't take art and property rights seriously. They're not about that. They have just given a big "fuck you" to anyone who has problems with having their art ripped off.
If you're looking for a place to host your art, maybe this is not that place.
Ike Njaka, the guy who runs Complex Capital Mortgage, agreed to a settlement in mid-January. In late January, I signed the settlement agreement. In late February, he sent his lawyer a check that was about $100 too small. We got a settlement agreement from him, dated March 2nd. I do wonder whether Complex Capital sent any faxes between January 25th and March 2nd. Today, we got a check signed by him, not passed through his lawyer's trust account. This check was rejected by the bank due to insufficient funds.
It takes balls to bounce a settlement check. Melon balls. In your skull, where the brain would be in a normal person. I mean, really. What was he thinking? Maybe next he'll say he wrote "paid in full" on the check stub in his checkbook, so the debt is satisfied. He owns this idea, you know; he wrote it and sent it to himself by certified mail.
What a maroon. Maybe he'll pay up by noon tomorrow. Maybe he'll be back in court.
I feel really bad for his lawyer.
Wendy's will now allow you to substitute salad for fries in combo meals. This is a very good thing. The salad isn't excellent, but it's not bad. The ceasar dressing is mediocre... But once again, not bad. If you want a ceasar dressing with some kick, go to a real restaurant. If you want something a whole lot tastier than fries with your meal, though, get the salad.
I really, really, hope this doesn't turn out to be just a fad; I'm really liking it.
Argh! This is the junk fax case I rarely talk about. It's mostly-nearly settled, but they want terms to be confidential until after they've mailed checks, because there would be fewer claims that way. They have done the whole nine yards with silly and/or false defenses, and I'm not inclined to be cooperative. Furthermore, how am I supposed to keep this information secret from journalists when I've been discussing the negotiations with my mom all along?
Also, they refuse to agree not to junk fax again; I infer that they plan to violate federal law again in the future. Bleh. You may rest assured, this puts them off my preferred vendor list.
Quakers tend to sit in circles quietly for worship. This involves putting out chairs. Attendance varies; we've had anywhere from 3 to 14 people at Wednesday night meetings. There's generally about 10 chairs. Sometimes, that's not enough, so we go get extra chairs, to make room.
There's just one thing. We don't wait for someone to show up, then make room. When someone shows up, if that person takes the last chair, someone gets another one. Ahead of time. So, when someone shows up, there will be room for one more. There is always room at the table.
This is a very neighborly way to be. I like it.
So, my wife and I are both inclined to collect music, and I keep all my music on the computer as MP3s. To be fair, we have about five downloaded songs in the collection; stuff that isn't in print, like Skeewiff's techno remix of Man Of Constant Sorrow. And, like most people, we have an album or two we don't own, such as a copy of the musical By Jeeves, which I have never seen for sale in the US.
The rest, we actually own. We're talking about hundreds of CDs. And, on a whim, I copied the 36GB directory tree over to my Mac Mini's external drive, and told iTunes to have a look.
7,740 songs. I knew that. 36.12GB. I knew that. 22.3 days. I did not know that.
Twenty two days. I could just leave this in shuffle-play for three weeks without repetition. Except for my two copies of Apollo 18, and a few songs that show up on more than one disc.
Still.
That's a lot of music. Worse, I could easily name a dozen albums I used to own, but lost, or that I really wanted but never got. Maybe once it's up to a solid month I should find a new hobby. Oh, wait. I already have one, suing junk faxers.
The idea of money laundering is to take money that is in some way dirty and make it clean. For instance, a business could take in a lot of cash, some of it stolen, but as long as that's normal for that business, it's hard to prove anything.
Let us imagine a contrast; money which comes from sleazy companies, and is to be made clean. This is the situation with junk fax money. These companies are slimey. I think every junk faxer that's made statements under penalty of perjury in my cases has lied. So I have to make this money clean. One way to do that is give it away.
Note that we're not talking any kind of tax dodge; I have to pay taxes, then give away what's left.
I first came up with this when dealing with CaDan, who were an exceptionally sleazy defendant. My original idea was just to count junk fax money against debts people owed me... But it occurred to me that this is hardly a real gift. So I decided to, instead, give money to people. I started with people who owe me money; there's plenty of those. The plan is to give them a bit more money than they owe me.
I can predict the response. "But if they just give you the money back, that's not really a gift!" Well, it wouldn't be, if there were some kind of requirement or expectation to that effect.
Here's some of the things people have done with junk faxer money:
I'd say that's a decent track record. This money is going to single parents trying to make ends meet, college graduates with long-overdue student loans, people trying to keep a job... It's making the world a better place. It's worth it. What was dirty money, ill-gotten gains of people violating a federal law with open contempt for the property of others, is becoming the money that keeps someone from starving, or being kicked out on the street. It's good now. Junk faxers, when they pay their dues, are actually helping make the world a better place. Unwillingly, but results matter.
FWIW, the current breakdown is about like this:
Legal fees: 35%
Costs: 6%
Taxes: 2%
Gifts: 57%
These numbers are approximate, even when they're down to the penny. There's a few special cases; one junk faxer settled for $2,000, then paid $500; we still need to talk to the courts about the breach-of-contract case. The taxes are very hard to calculate; the US tax system lumps all income together. Legal fees may sound high, but for the number of hours my lawyer's put into these cases, it's a pretty good bargain. He's getting better than minimum wage, but it's a far cry from the kinds of numbers people associate with legal efforts...
These numbers are pretty reasonable, though, and they give some idea for where all the money goes. It's frustrating, sometimes, thinking "hey, I could just keep this money"... But what good will dirty money do me? The temptation to litigousness is too real to me; I'll give the money away, and consider this an expensive hobby. Well, not so bad; I'm currently down by about $35, and I've gotten hours and hours of fun.