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TwiceHorn

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Everything posted by TwiceHorn

  1. Latest local lawdogette (lawbitch?) victim of AI: https://search.txcourts.gov/SearchMedia.aspx?MediaVersionID=83b29ea2-0113-4437-98c8-b00e40461e50&coa=coa05&DT=Order&MediaID=3f8209ac-9743-49b1-9498-660632c0c354 So, this case was a creditor of John and Donna Rochon seeking to recover $1M of jewelry allegedly gifted to their daughters before being sued by their creditors. John Rochon was CEO of Mary Kay after her son, Richard Rogers, stepped down. He (or Richard or both), took Mary Kay private and everyone became fabulously wealthy, with the Rochons maintaining a fleet of Maseratis for the entire family, private jets, etc. https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2004/march/not-so-pretty-in-pink/ They have a "family office" in the form of Richmont (lol) Capital Partners. https://richmont.net/ In the 25 years since stepping down from Mary Kay, Rochon pere et fils et filles has gone from fabulously wealthy to insolvent with a string of bankruptcies and fraud suits. Amazing shit. Lived in Dallas most of my life, and at least passingly familiar with Mary Kay, the person and the company. Had never heard of these Rochon grifters, but it's a really sordid saga. Culminating in their daughter filing a partially bullshit brief in what appears to be a losing effort to hang on to a bunch of expensive jewelry.
  2. I don't recall Limewire. Vague recollections of Napster. But the difference here is that Limewire and Napster and similar P2P things were a vehicle for infringement, but not a direct infringer, only a contributory one. Neither Napster nor Limewire had the specific intent to directly infringe copyrights, they provided a means for their users to do so (knowing full well that they would). Kinda like the internet at large. This is an entity deliberately and knowingly directly infringing copyright on a scale similar to Limewire or Napster. Their only excuse in some cases being a thin fair use defense. To that end, the Copyright Office' "preliminary" view of infringement/fair use in training AI. Along with some political controversy. https://copyrightlately.com/copyright-office-ai-report/
  3. And we have others not bending the knee and calling this for what it is.
  4. The AG doesn't really have any business doing that in the first place, because the AG doesn't represent the President, or really even the Office of the President. All that other shit aside. That's a job for OLC and White House counsel, the OLC providing guidance to the executive branch generally, and White House counsel advocating for the President specifically. All DOJ, but traditionally with different responsibilities and "clients."
  5. Man, this is one of those examples where shareholder suits and class actions in particular are pretty ridiculous. Just about any time a publicly traded company has a price gyration, particularly a drop, they get sued for securities fraud and/or breach of fiduciary duty. They mostly settle for decent, but not meaningful-in-a-big-way, amounts. The only real winners are the entrepreneurial lawyers that brought them. A facile response is to ban such suits. Most large corporations would be highly in favor of doing so and are probably lobbying intensely for it right now. Any such action needs to be carefully considered lest we get the "tort reform" result. But they do, if not often, serve a purpose in regulating corporate behavior in ways that even an effective SEC cannot. This is the type of suit that kept Elmo from getting his ridiculous comp package. I'm sure that's a popular result and this may be a popular result. The actual effect on corporate behavior is, I think, negligible. Also, this gets into that whole lawyer ethics thing. The real personal motivation for most of these suits is to make money for lawyers. But, they follow all the rules and most of the precedents and serve the theoretical reason for their existence (curb corporate behavior) to at least a tiny extent. And you can find other examples of such suits that serve to compensate the truly defrauded and actually punish or deter bad corporate behavior. So, should we do something about these lawsuits and lawyers when their motivations and raisons d'etre are quite a bit less than noble, and risk the unintended consequences? Or just let things chuckle along as usual? That is a bit of a false choice, as there are tweaks that could be made that reduce the ridiculous, hopefully without also reducing the sublime, but there is always the risk of unintended consequences.
  6. Valid questions. But the manufacturing jobs in question aren't shop/factory-floor jobs. They're things like engineering, marketing, etc. that are traditionally considered degree-holder jobs. Robots/automation may never replace skilled workers entirely, but they've already replaced a lot of unskilled jobs in manufacturing. Old-time manufacturing provided lots of jobs for halfwits and morons. Now now so much. We're still gonna have the moron problem.
  7. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/05/13/g-s1-66112/why-arent-americans-filling-the-manufacturing-jobs-we-already-have Key takeaway: Part of the political appeal of bringing manufacturing back is that, historically, they've provided good jobs and career ladders for people without a college education. However, many manufacturing jobs these days actually require college degrees. Carolyn Lee, the president and executive director of the Manufacturing Institute, says that roughly half of the open positions in manufacturing require at least a bachelor's degree.
  8. Yeah, he didn't do this to help fellow richies, except the long-term goal of eliminating income tax. He didn't know the market was gonna tank anymore than he knows how tariffs work. But, create a disturbance in the market and the richies will benefit more than anyone else as they can more easily absorb the risk of short-selling and similar strategies on a scale that reaps huge rewards. Give them even more inside information and it's that much worse.
  9. Some follow-up on the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. A day later, Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights, who administers the Copyright Office and is influential on copyright policy, was fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shira_Perlmutter Like the Librarian of Congress, the Register is an apolitical position and was appointed by the Librarian. Trump I's House tried to make it a presidential appointment, but it failed in the Senate. Anyway, as the link below states, Perlmutter served with honor and distinction and without political rancor. Where this gets insidious is that the Copyright Office has been considering AI policy as pertains to copyright. Just before Perlmutter's dismissal, a "prepublication" of Section 3 of the Report dropped. It generally favors creators over AI takers. It's a nuanced report. And AI Big Tech hates it and has been lobbying Trumpco to make copying for purposes of training LLMs fair use (not infringement) in all cases. More here. https://copyrightlately.com/copyright-office-ai-report/
  10. Haha sorry, love me a threadjack. But, there don't seem to be many developments in the AARP and JGG cases of late, so surly minds will wander. A sidenote. The notion of deporting immigrants to other than their country of origin is not without precedent, both benign and insidious. When we have an asylum applicant that doesn't clear the bar for asylum, we could do the cruel and send them back to the country where they are persecuted. Or, we could send them somewhere else that will take them and where they are willing to go. That has happened in our history. The UK, doubtless under Tory leadership (but I didn't check who really originated the idea, Boris, Nigel, Liz or one of the other Hitler Youth), prepped up Rwanda for that purpose, I suppose mostly for African immigrants/asylum seekers. Or maybe just being dicks. That's where Trump got that idea. The UK never actually did it although they had an agreement with Rwanda to do so. I guess Libya is just a more hideous variant on that notion. And most of Central America is pretty fucked up so sending a Salvadoran to Honduras or Guatemala isn't really an improvement on anything. Belize probably isn't taking anyone.
  11. Tells you a lot about what kind of porn the P2025ers watch.
  12. Well, you may not be able to count on SCOTUS to support Trump, but you can probably count on them to support big business.
  13. Interetsing proposition. Possibly true, if he was fluent in Russian. But, I'd think anyone engaged in negotiation or nuanced communication would want a translator from their side to capture that nuance and avoid Russian sidebars that go untranslated. Also, she is 100% FSB or SVR.
  14. I caught some of this by accident after a Texas game went off on ESPN. It's really pretty amusing in a slapstick kind of way. Kinda glad they're succeeding with it.
  15. You gotta know Trump wanted them to give it to him personally. The Emir or Sheikh or whoever probably said, you know we can't do that, we have to give it to your government, and Trump was like, "OK, but I want it after."
  16. He couldn't find any whale juice.
  17. But you see, once you start talking about it, everyone comes down with it. Like teh ghey, or gender dysphoria.
  18. Well, I guess here's a thing. Lawyers are required to report unethical conduct in violation of the rules, as set forth in the rule above. But only conduct that they KNOW about, as well as a few other nuances expressed and hinted at in the rule, above. That actually tends to require witnessing it in its full context. I think a lot of bystanders and laypeople think they've seen unethical conduct by what is reported as having happened by various sources, but lacking a lot of context, if not being flat-out inaccurate. And I suppose this means that someone somewhere, one of us lawdogs, should have reported that fucker post-haste. But the lawdogs rightly don't trust legal reporting. It's mostly shit. And even if it's not shit, you really do have to have actually witnessed it or been a party to it to make a valid ethics complaint or report. Most Texas lawyers of a certain age, that came along during and for a few years after the S&L crisis are pretty attuned to ethical things, at least as concerns litigation conduct. That era of hideous bullshit produced the famous Dondi opinion https://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Dondi.PDF and the Texas Lawyer's Creed. One feature of that era was both sides to every dispute accusing the other side of litigation misconduct and ethical violations at every turn. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, making an ethics report against another attorney is not something taken lightly. Doing it improvidently or out of pique or to gain an advantage is probably itself an ethical violation.
  19. Also, I forgot to add that the primary remedy at the federal level for removal of corrupt judges is out of the hands of lawyers, it's impeachment. So another one of those instances when politics and electoral politics bounds or dictates aspects of the legal profession.
  20. That the profession is policed by the State Bar of Texas, which is in turn run by a lawyer voted for by lawyers and is funded by lawyer dues and taxes, is not a disputable fact. I said the effectiveness of that may be questionable. There are a variety of reasons for that, some of which I have touched on in this thread.
  21. Who exactly do you think leads the charge for reforms? https://www.aclu.org/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/ One of the issues made stark by the Trump prosecutions was the time/delay involved in securing convictions and exhausting appeals. Most lawyers tend to accept that everything takes a helluva long time and that maybe it's the right balance of cost and experience. But funding is, as much as any other single thing, the determinant of the length of delays. More judges means less work for each judge and more court time to devote to the various matters before them. Might also need a few more courtrooms. There are 46 current federal judicial vacancies. https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judicial-vacancies/current-judicial-vacancies And that is existing judgeships. Almost every district court in the US is or has recently been under consideration for added judgeships, but no one wants to pay for it. 75 most recently. https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judiciary-news/2025/03/11/judiciary-seeks-71-judgeships-meet-growing-caseloads
  22. Well, what this presupposes is that there is something these people did, before they became judges, that disqualifies them from being lawyers, and in turn, judges, that their fellow lawyers should have acted upon. Also, Scalia doesn't really belong in that pantheon of shitheads. As a shithead, he was a real piker compared to those other two, and Alito, and a couple dozen others you could name.
  23. No one said anything is just fine. Lawyers do self police, or the bar polices them. The effectiveness of that may be questionable, the fact that it happens is not. The lawyers getting disbarred and disciplined every month reported in the Bar Journal has been posted here before. https://www.texasbar.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=articles&ContentID=67750&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm
  24. By the same token, it is actually the lawyers who are doing the most, and the most effectively, to at least slow this shit down. It is quite distressing that there are lawyers, but fewer of them, on the other side. And, your post also demonstrates that law is a reflection of the society it serves. What society values, the law protects, what society doesn't value, it does not. In and out groups and whatnot. And that's not inherently a reflection on lawyers, but the framework in which lawyers operate, which is heavily influenced, or bounded by political/legislative/electoral actions.
  25. The other thing is that this is probably what Medicare will pay for that drug, not what you, I, or our insurance company will pay for that drug. And Pharma is gonna sue the shit out of the Administration and this will not take effect, if at all, for years.
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