When one person associated with the attorney is a plaintiff in 200 lawsuits, it does start to seem opportunistic.
Nevertheless, I can't understand why someone would open a cafe in 2007 at a site that wasn't compliant with a 1990 law without budgeting for bringing it into compliance.
> When one person associated with the attorney is a plaintiff in 200 lawsuits, it does start to seem opportunistic.
Wait, why? Certainly one would expect that a lawyer might have a specialization, say, ADA compliance. And you'd equally expect that a person in a wheelchair who is more likely to notice/care about ADA compliance.
It doesn't strike me as that odd, it just seems like, "Hey, why is the city I live in so busted for me? I thought there was a law that was supposed to give me access? Why is no one paying attention to that law?"
The problem is CA has opted to allow "citizen enforcement" via cash settlements instead of allowing grace periods or some other means of remediation. As noted in the article, if the goal was bring businesses up to code, in many cases a simple letter from the lawyer would suffice. But, that doesn't make money for the lawyer and her husband (who faked disabilities in order to sue).
Because the lawyer allegedly had her ex-husband pretend to be disabled in order to file the lawsuits.
Lawsuits require standing, which is defined as basically injury or adverse effect done to the suing party. Without that, you cannot sue(and expect to win).
OP said it starts to seem opportunistic, which I think is true, even if the party is actually disabled. Because the odds that a regular disabled person would encounter 200 unique buildings over a year that they couldn't access because of their disability seems quite slim.
And the opportunistic part comes in because these lawsuits are almost always "Fix the problem for $5*X, or pay me personally $X and I will drop the suit".
> Because the odds that a regular disabled person would encounter 200 unique buildings over a year that they couldn't access because of their disability seems quite slim.
I would guess the opposite, that 200 buildings seems low for what a person might encounter in a year that failed to be accessible. That's basically saying, "It's a roughly 4-5 buildings a week" which absolutely seems in the realm of possibility to me. Especially in a older part of town.
I think you're underestimating the size of 200. ADA compliance is a worthy cause, but at that level of effort I think it would make more sense to create an advocacy group and try to bring about compliance through public pressure than individual lawsuits.
Nevertheless, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the business owner in this case. If you open a business in a non-compliant site 17 years after the ADA went into effect, and 13 years later still can't build a ramp, it might be time for another business to occupy that site.
> The prefix/postfix change is a red herring, that doesn't do anything
The prefix/postfix change does something to the reader. It's a distraction trying to figure out if that change was intended, whether the author knows it has no effect, or whether I'm wrong about the change having no effect.
I appreciate the author doing the hard work of fixing this, especially with the code in full view of the public, but if I were an official reviewer I'd ask to get all the unnecessary changes removed.
If these investments of yours were as much of a sure bet (or adequately sure bet) as you're suggesting, banks would simply cut out the middle-person (i.e. the borrower) and invest in these things directly.
I think banks make their money not on interest rates but on various fees and overheads: each person getting a mortgage pays 10K (or more) to the bank right away. That is huge upfront money in addition to the interest rate.
also folks on average refinance or sell their property every 10 years meaning folks on a 30 year restart, paying new origination fees and once more the bulk of their payments are interest.
Why would they? For the longest time retail banks weren’t allowed to, and investment banks get risk free money via management and brokerage fees. All investing returns involve risk, it depends on your time horizon.
I don't think it rises to the level of dishonesty, but I do think the writer should not have included something as unknowable and irrelevant as the possible hidden motives of these agencies.
Nevertheless, suing these agencies to prevent unwarranted surveillance is justified.
> [T]he other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon...
I don't think that's true. The tone of American political news nowadays doesn't seem that different than British newspapers in the 1990s. "It's the Sun wot won it" was an explicit boast about The Sun's polarizing influence... in 1992.
Of course both The Sun and Fox News in the US are part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But if anything this style of news seems like it arrived in the UK ten or twenty years before it was manifest in the US.
Just because your economic situation is unsustainable where you are doesn't mean you'd be better off someplace else. If you arrive in a new city without a job and without connections, you're in trouble from the moment you get there.
This is terrible advice.