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How companies make millions off lead-poisoned, poor blacks
- travjones 11y agoThis is really sad. Isn't "competence" a necessary prerequisite for entering into legal contracts?
- x5n1 11y agoPretty much. Entering into a contract with a brain damaged individual who was not at all educated would get the contract thrown out of court pretty quickly.
- schoen 11y agoThat sounds, maybe ironically in this context, like a class-action lawsuit opportunity. Or maybe individual litigation on contingency (to void the contract for lack of capacity to contract, or another theory).
- jessaustin 11y agoMaybe I'm an ignorant jackass for asking this, but how can someone who lacks competence to enter contracts ever litigate on a contingency basis?
- orionblastar 11y agoIn the article the same woman falls for a different company to sell her settlement to, and it gets thrown out of court because she already sold it to the first company. If someone has brain damage and struggled with an education, usually a custodian is assigned to take care of their finances and make financial and legal decisions for them. In this case it didn't happen, and her name and phone number is on a list of people who got settlements that these companies buy and then call and scam out of their settles for pennies on the dollar.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- calebm 11y agoThat line of reasoning is a double-edged sword.
- S_A_P 11y agoCould there be a more inflammatory click baity title for this?
- codemac 11y agoInflammatory? Unfortunately, some things will incite a rise within any reasonable person, regardless of title. This is definitely one of those articles. Not to mention the title is concise and accurate, while summarizing the article well.
- ps4fanboy 11y agoAre they targeting blacks or poor people with settlements? I didn't see anything in the article to support the claim that its racial.
- ThomPete 11y agoDoes it matter? It's black people who are affected by it.
- Frozenlock 11y agoYes, it matters. It's poor practice for a journalist to include the race, sexual orientation, religion, etc... of someone if it has nothing to do with the story.
- auntienomen 11y agoAre you more bothered by the fact that the title might not be perfect, or by the fact that a bunch of sleazy lawyers are ripping off disabled people?
- brazzledazzle 11y agoIt would be unfair of me to attribute this to the person you're replying to, but I've noticed that on sites like HN and reddit there seems to be a strange desire by some people to try to make things not about race, gender or sexual preference as much as possible. It's as if they are somehow lessened or hurt by it but I'm not sure how. Perhaps a feeling of guilt and wanting to deflect it drives that behavior. But it is present in the comments of a lot of articles that bring up or imply race, gender or sexual orientation is a factor.
- zecho 11y agoFascinating businesses. I bet some smart hacker could totally improve this process, though.
- brazzledazzle 11y agoIs this a joke?
- emodendroket 11y agoMaybe they could bring in Bitcoin somehow.
- ThomPete 11y agoAnd this is why we should always remember that "the marke" should serve as our servant, not our master". If the logic of the market become more important than the people it's supposed to serve then why have it in the first place? Im exaggerating of course but wow.
- mhurron 11y ago> Im exaggerating of course but wow Why pull back like that? This is exactly what the US is driven towards. 'The Market' is more important than any person in the country. Taking advantage of people is big business and because 'The Market' has spoken it is left to operate.
- ThomPete 11y agoNothing is black or white. I am not pulling back, but whether this example is enough to claim that the market has failed is another question.
- orangecat 11y agoMeanwhile, governments specifically target the poor with lottery advertising. There will always be scumbags who prey on the weak; at least when they're in the private sector they can be sued or arrested.
- Frondo 11y agoLottery laws can be changed too, of course. And our government has a regularly scheduled changing of the people in power. I know of no corporation where the citizenry regularly votes on senior management.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoThis isn't a market. Markets operate between consenting adults; these people lack the mental faculties to count as consenting adults. The buyers here are actually violating the rights of the sellers.
- nostromo 11y agoThey can sue to get the contract voided, just like anyone with a mental disability that prevents them from understanding a contract. The article mentions this, but says that they often aren't incapacitated enough to void the agreements -- which puts them in a strange gray area. It's similar to scams that prey on the elderly.
- hkmurakami 11y agoI would suspect that they would have to argue their case for incapacitation in court, which comes with legal fees, which they likely cannot afford. Perhaps a class action lawsuit with many such victims assembled will be compelling enough in size that a law firm will take the case on a contingency basis.
- amenghra 11y agoThe result of such a class action lawsuit would be a lawyer (or a bunch of lawyers) making a ton of money and the victims getting a coupon for a happy meal at the local fast food chain.
- hkmurakami 11y agoYes, that is a very good point. Are there any contingency contracts for these class action suits where the lawyers agree to a fixed percentage of the settlement, which would hopefully leave a decent amount for the victims? Perhaps there can be a "bidding" system if the victims can self organize and then look for a law firm to represent them -- kind of like how architecture firms win contracts?
- amenghra 11y agoThese people unfortunately have a hard time with basic reading/cognitive skills. Unless the government or a non-profit helps them out they are going to have a hard time self organizing and pull off the best possible deal. Besides ethical reasons, it's in everyone's best interest to make sure that poor people don't get abused in this way because when they end up needing social services (shelter, food, medical aid, etc.) that help comes from every tax payer's money.
- reader5000 11y agoAre these actually bad deals? If the payments stop at death of the seller, the buyer is taking on legitimate risk. Plus all "present value" calculations are of course uncertain. Ignoring the race drama the author apparently needed to drive clicks, a different interpretation is that these companies are providing value to these people in converting slow streams of cash payments into lump sums of cash.
- emodendroket 11y ago> Are these actually bad deals? Yes.
- reader5000 11y agoSo how much would you pay for 350 monthly payments of $1000 on the contingency the payments stop at death of the seller?
- emodendroket 11y agoThat isn't really an answerable question without filling in a lot of demographic information. In addition, I'm guessing these companies typically have more than one "client" and get to amortize their risk across all of them and I can't help but imagine this is an extremely profitable enterprise (certainly from the article that seems to be true of Access).
- lips 11y agoRisk? The fact that these are legal settlements is exactly why this leaps directly into a distinct category from stuff like pay-day loans.
- emodendroket 11y agoRegarding risk, I'd say they're being more than compensated for their risk: > Taken together, the sample shows Access Funding petitioned to buy roughly $6.9 million worth of future payments — which had a present value of $5.3 million — for around $1.7 million. This is particularly true when you consider that the only real risk is the annuitant dying before you recoup the money you paid them and that most of the one-time payouts seem to be in the range of $16,000, while many of the monthly payouts seem to be around $1000/mo. Given those numbers, in two years (padding a bit for extra costs to close the deal) you've recouped your initial cost and the rest is just gravy until the annuitant dies. Payday loans (which are also extremely exploitative, frankly) at least have the more likely risk of the borrower being unable to pay you back to justify the raw deal.
- emodendroket 11y agoThere's a special place in Hell for people whose job is to trick brain-damaged people out of their settlements.
- jessaustin 11y agoOne would think that eventually the unfortunate neighbors, erstwhile friends, and shamed families of Michael Borkowski, Charles E. Smith, and Brendan Franks would help them see the error of their ways.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoUnfortunately, there is no Hell, so we'd better do something about the issue in this world.
- codezero 11y agoI wanted to say the same thing but didn't because I was worried I'd be downvoted.
- emodendroket 11y agoI think it's a useful rhetorical device and I'm not really so confident anything will be done.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoNice to see that atheists can also be humorless and overly-literal. Edit: Honest question to downvoters: You are aware that "a special place in Hell" is a figure of speech, yes? That emodendroket was not actually saying "no need to fix this problem, God will take care of it"? Or are you perhaps interpreting my post as a knee-jerk dig at all atheists, as opposed to just at eli_gottlieb for being overly pedantic?
- prawn 11y agoI think there's value in the comment. Pushes a discussion towards a realistic solution to this sort of thing.
- deciplex 11y ago> Still, Borkowski urged stricter legislation and more oversight. “These questions you raise touch on fundamental things we are going to be doing differently now,” he said. “We want to secure ourselves in the future from any potential questions like this again, so we can say, ‘No, that’s not us.’ ” Isn't this an admission of guilt?
- srtjstjsj 11y agoNo, there is wide gulf between "guilty" and "best way to do it"
- srtjstjsj 11y agoNo, there is wide gulf between "guilty" and "best way to do it"
- 6502nerdface 11y agoNot necessarily... In any business there's such a thing as "headline risk," distinct from legal or compliance risk. It's where the mere perception of wrongdoing can be almost as damaging to your business as actual wrongdoing/noncompliance; anything can be spun as sinister by an unsympathetic press. So to mitigate headline risk you might actually make your compliance controls much stronger than legally necessary. I think Borkowski is trying to say something like his business is fundamentally honest, but the reporter has raised some serious points of possible misperception about it, and they're going to make some compliance changes to clarify themselves against possible misperceptions of wrongdoing. Of course it's kind of too late if you're finding out about your headline risk from a reporter. And not to defend these bozos.
- lotu 11y agoSometimes, the easiest person to fool is yourself.
- powera 11y agoThis is where your libertarian "unrestricted right to contract" turns sour.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoThat's a strawman - at least, in the case of minarchist-Libertarians. We explicitly advocate for restricted right to contract. Some examples of proscribed contracts include those involving minors, or slavery (see 'unalienable rights').
- ThomPete 11y agoWho is going to uphold that?
- nsxwolf 11y agoAre you confusing libertarians with anarchists?
- duncan_bayne 11y agoYeah, I think he may be, which is why I posted in the first place.
- ThomPete 11y agoNo I am aware of the difference, just would love to hear how something like that was going to be managed.
- duncan_bayne 11y ago(See also, in part, my reply above to maxxxxx). I guess the bulk of it it would be much the same as what we have now: courts, police, Government departments tasked with protecting the rights of the population. There would be laws against murder, assault, rape, fraudulent advertising, running two-stroke cars[1], etc. etc. The main change would be that whole classes of crimes (drug crimes, obscenity, blasphemy, private discrimination[2], etc.) would simply disappear. And - if this were the USA - a lot of powers currently improperly usurped by the Federal Government would be instead claimed by the States, assuming their constitutions allowed. [1] In other words, collective problems justify collective legislation. If smoky two-stroke cars cause human harm by polluting the air, it may be reasonable to ban them by legislation. [2] By law, the State would be prohibited from discriminating on the grounds of race, religion, sex, marital status, etc. But individuals would be free to discriminate in whatever rational or irrational manner they chose.
- Spooky23 11y agoThis is just an egregious example of people abusing the poor and helpless. Plenty of the landlords who own those building are as bad or worse. Worse still are the institutional owners who hang onto tenement property to serve as a buffer.
- oh_sigh 11y agoWhy does this lady have power of attorney over herself if she is "brain damaged" and can't read or write(presumably due to said brain damage, and not just laziness).
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoGood point. Sad part is she discussed it on the phone with her lawyer. Good grief... my brother is a lawyer, if he ever got a call from a client saying a man came over, bought her steak and would give her a lumpsum of money in return for her monthly payment contract, all alarm bells would go off. He wouldn't even need to see the specific contract or have to be aware his client is mentally challenged to say 'no', first and foremost, followed with 'send it over or come over so we can review the contract'.
- rgbrenner 11y agoSad part is she discussed it on the phone with her lawyer. No.. the lawyer was an "independent adviser" to her. He worked on every single one of Access 52's deals. Basically, he would call them up, ask if they understood the deal. That's it. And that really underscores how mentally incompetent she was. Some random lawyer calls her up out of the blue, and she takes his advice. More details about 2/3rds into the article (search for the guys name "Charles E. Smith" and you'll find the section about the lawyers involved.)
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoMakes a lot more sense. Thanks for replying!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- anothermoron 11y agoTss, it's not like the site is called hacker news.
- z2 11y agoPer submission guidelines, this could fall under the "interesting new phenomenon" category. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Furthermore, the guidelines state: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click "flag" at the top."
- throwaway7861 11y agoI am sincerely sorry to think this, but what jumped out to me was the fact that the owner's names "Blumenfeld" and "Borowski" are both jewish names. It is instances like these that will eventually lead to the rise of economic antisemitism in America.
- dangerlibrary 11y agoBorowski is a Polish name.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoDon't feed the troll, everybody.
- fiatmoney 11y agoAside from the Justice Preening, this raises some interesting ethical questions about time preference. I mean, in a lot of cases they understood exactly what they were doing - giving up some money tomorrow in exchange for some today. They just made a more drastic tradeoff than, say, traders selling treasury bonds, but less drastic than, say, the millions of people taking payday loans, or those same traders if they expected interest rates to rise to 30%. It's unclear what exactly it means to "not understand" the tradeoff - presumably if you said the words to them they would repeat them back and tell you they "understand" that this will happen in the future; it's not exactly a difficult calculation, just an if-then. Does competency then require some kind of accurate estimation on their part of future regret? This seems like a really high bar that millions of, eg, high functioning alcoholics or one-night-stand partakers fail each day. Does lead screw with time preference specifically? I would assume so, but is it more or less than would be expected given the effect on general mental capacity? How high of time preference is "too high"? Is it unethical to transact with someone who wants things NOW just a little too strongly, maybe even so strongly that they don't bother to comparison shop? Do our ethics require them to be pariahs, even though they're not "incompetent" enough for someone else to be responsible for their affairs? Would cashing them in at parity with the estimated present value (which, given their condition, they're likely to squander over roughly the same time period they squandered the larger amount) be more un/ethical? Equally?
- harryh 11y agoExcellent comment and similar to a thought I had while reading this. Sure, in this case there are legitimate competency questions that make us wonder if the individuals in question should even be allowed to enter into a contract of this nature. But it's not that hard to imagine Access Funding making similar deals with other owners of structured settlements. Can a man who was hit by a car and lost the use of his leg sell his settlement at a drastic discount like we see here? How big a discount is too big? I suppose this is why some states have usury laws. Above a certain interest rate the state decides that willingness to take the loan is, in and of itself, evidence of lack of competency.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ccvannorman 11y agoThe Dickishness human gene strikes again. Solution? Maybe the people who live in those cities can sue these companies in a class action lawsuit for grievances. I guess that's what courts are for. Unfortunately, "who's going to do it?" I sure as heck don't have time or energy for it. :/
- frogpelt 11y agoTotal click-bait headline from the Washington Post? Wow. It absolutely makes no difference what race the poor people are.
- craigmcnamara 11y agoThey're talking about baltimore you ass. Have you ever been? It's as black as the cast of the wire and the people there have been systematically taken advantage of, which is significant because white people or people that happen to be white aren't systematically the targetted by these scams. Yes, they are scams if they take advantage of a person with brain damage because of lead paint.
- chm 11y ago“A lot of them can barely read,” said Saul E. Kerpelman, who estimates he has defended more than 4,000 victims of lead poisoning, nearly all of them black. They suggest the demographics support the title.
- omegaworks 11y agoWhen the country has systematically denied access to capital to a certain race of people, and continues to support and legitimize this practice, it absolutely makes a difference what race these people are. Black lives matter.
- monochromatic 11y agoAll lives matter.
- omegaworks 11y agohttps://fatherhoodetc.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/all-houses.jpg https://fatherhoodetc.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/all-houses...
- omegaworks 11y ago>It is not simply said as a matter of truth or a statement of values. Instead, it's a rebuttal to the statement "Black Lives Matter." >Instead of communicating a love for all beings, "All Lives Matter" are words of negation, repudiation, and refutation. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bedrick/whats-the-matter-with-all-lives-matter_b_7922482.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bedrick/whats-the-matter...
- djrogers 11y agoWhat struck me wasn't that this was a bad deal (it isn't) but that it's a bad deal for them. If I personally, being of sound mind and making a good wage, were offered a similar buyout of a structured settlement I'd take it. The future value of 63k with 7% compounding earnings over 35 years easily outpaces the value of the monthly payments. And over that long a time horizon 7% would be easy to get - it's well under the market growth for any given 35 year period. But that's me - I don't need the money to live off of every month, i don't have a disability that makes me unemployable, and I don't need those checks every month. If those were my circumstances though? I'd be pissed!!!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- harryh 11y agoCongratulations djrogers! By sucking at math you just cost yourself nearly 1.5 million dollars in retirement savings! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y3PFiRhnixOcqeVrxZ2jc0f9Hf6ZAoJeGsjZ_NNSWd4/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y3PFiRhnixOcqeVrxZ2j... I think one of the kind men from Access Funding would like to buy you a steak dinner.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoYour monthly interest rate isn't quite right, it's 7% / 12, rather than 1.07^(1/12). i.e., if the annual interest rate is 100% (doubles every year), then it'd be incorrect to say the 6-month interest is half that (50%). As two terms of 50% would be a 125% increase, not 100%. To get to 100% you'd need two terms of 41%. If you apply this to the monthly rate it drops by a little. Compounded over all those years, the total amount drops to by about 6%. As the one value drops by a larger amount in absolute terms, the earnings difference actually drops by about $50k. Either way, it's still a ridiculous difference and your point fully stands.
- harryh 11y agoYa, good point. I was being a lil' quick and dirty when I put my spreadsheet together. Fixed.
- roymurdock 11y agoInterestingly enough, the business examined by this article (Access Funding LLC) is Better Business Bureau accredited. [1] What kinds of businesses aren't BBB accredited these days? The owner and CEO of Access Funding LLC, Lee J. Jundanian, started a business called Rapid Advance LLC in 2005. [2] This company specialized in structuring advances "on terms that experts say most small businesses, especially distressed ones, would have little hope of meeting", doing a large amount of business during the financial crisis. The advances are not considered loans because there is no set payback period; therefore, "the industry is completely unregulated, and companies can charge customers whatever they want." Calculating the cost of an MCA [merchant cash advance] is a bit complicated. Because it doesn’t accrue interest over time, the more quickly one repays the advance, the more expensive it is. For example, if a merchant agrees to pay $70,000 for a $50,000 advance, and it pays it off in six months, the effective annual interest rate is 80 percent. If paid off in three months, the rate jumps to 160 percent. Pay the advance off in a month and the rate skyrockets to 480 percent. Funnily enough, Mr. Jundanian was awarded with the prestigious "Entrepreneur of the Year Award" by Ernst & Young in 2008 for growing Rapid Advance so quickly. Clearly they were impressed with his ability to find such a profitable way to use questionable accounting to legally prey on vulnerable business owners. Seems like he's found a new avenue for his talents. [1] http://www.bbb.org/washington-dc-eastern-pa/business-reviews/financial-services/access-funding-llc-in-chevy-chase-md-235996786/ http://www.bbb.org/washington-dc-eastern-pa/business-reviews... [2] http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2010/07/19/story18.html http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2010/07/19/sto...
- jeo1234 11y agoIn Canada it is a crime to charge more then 60% per annum. I would not be shocked if the States had something similar on the books. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/page-179.html#docCont http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/page-179.html#d... Edit: It's a States issue. It looks like Massachusetts has some rules http://www.mass.gov/courts/case-legal-res/law-lib/laws-by-subj/about/interestrates.html http://www.mass.gov/courts/case-legal-res/law-lib/laws-by-su....
- zajd 11y ago
- maerF0x0 11y agoNo one would be telling sob stories if they thought that they might pull a Warren Buffet w/ their payout. $60k was more than enough to get buffet to billions. Maybe the company used the wrong discount? Really roughly those discounts seem pretty generous, they're approximately stock market investment rates. Meaning if the poor recipients put the money in the "market" (maybe not this week) they'd average the same amount of total payout.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoNot at all. Try doing 60k at a 7% market rate (which is optimistic by the way). You get to about 600k. Now value the monthly payments invested in a similar manner, you get to around $2m. It's a gigantic difference. And no not even Buffet had the returns necessary to make money out of this (which is an average of > 23% annual returns for 35 years). This isn't some government agency giving you the approximate lifetime value upfront as a way to offer choice. It's a for-profit business looking to cash in on the difference, not a charity, not a break-even operation. They're there to make as much money as possible. Doesn't take much to assume they're not going to be 'approximately stock market investment rates', and if you look at the numbers, surprise surprise they aren't anywhere near it because it wouldn't make them any money.
- maerF0x0 11y ago> It's a for-profit business looking to cash in on the difference, not a charity, not a break-even operation. They're there to make as much money as possible. Like most/all businesses? They're selling a product, whats being disagreed upon is the price. My back of envelope calcs suggested they were getting about market rates (7-8%) but i also admit that I am not well versed in those maths.
- rl3 11y agoI think you're missing a subtle but important point here - namely, that Warren Buffet can read.
- paulhauggis 11y ago"She remembered a nice, white man. He had called her one day on the telephone months after she’d squeaked through high school with a “one-point something” grade-point average." #Nottheonion If the users here on HN can't see that this article is heavily biased and racist, there's something wrong. It's this sort of thing that leads me to believe that 'smart' people aren't all that smart and can easily be manipulated by the media and people that power-hungry politicians. cough Global Warming cough This article is trash and shouldn't even be here on HN.
- DanBC 11y agoCan you point out a biased sentence? I'm going to ignore your global warming comment. At some point you're going to have to accept that the vast majority of scientists accept that climate change is real and that the vast majority of people who deny the reality of climate change are not scientists and have misunderstood the science.
- paulhauggis 11y ago"At some point you're going to have to accept that the vast majority of scientists accept that climate change is real and that the vast majority of people who deny the reality of climate change are not scientists and have misunderstood the science." Like I said, I never said Climate change isn't 'real'. The dispute is how much the climate is changing and what is causing it. The vast majority of climate scientists: 1) It would be career-suicide to express any other opinion about climate change besides the current narrative. Many have already been fired for doing so. I was in Academia for many years and pretty much everything has to do with politics. 2) Rely on the same sets of data. Confirmation bias is a real thing. If you even bothered to look at the website I mentioned, you would see that some of the main studies used for climate change proof are not peer-reviewed. If 'science' means research without peer-review, completely invalid studies, the refusal to admit studies that are wrong, silencing opposition, and using politics to bully the opposition, I will agree. However, this isn't science and if it was just science as you say, we wouldn't have politics, lying, and outright fraud involved in so many instances. Al Gore, for instance, is now a wealthy man for essentially getting laws passed to force companies to buy carbon credits from his own companies. He pushed 'Global Warming' as 'Settled science' and the science community accepted it. The pope came out a few months back and backed climate change. Everyone pointed to this as some sort of proof. They ignored the fact that the pope also talked about how trans-gender people are not seen as human in the eyes of god. If you can't see the problem here, you don't really understand science yourself.
- randyrand 11y agoHow relevant is the lead dialogue? My intuition says it's mainly to add to the emotional narrative rather than the tangible one. But I'm curious if its actually a apt point. Anyone have any concrete info either way?
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoIt's relevant because it's the reason she's getting $1k in payments in the first place, as a settlement from whoever was responsible for the lead. It's not that she sold welfare payments and wants to explain away the bad decision with lead. It's that she's a damaged person (lead is a neurotoxin), got settlement payments, and made a bad decision that's more understandable in that context. Without the lead dialogue, she made a bad decision she could've prevented herself you might be able to argue. With the lead dialogue it's, on a mental level, probably quite similar like stealing candy from a baby. Now imagine the baby has to live off of settlements for decades, which have just been reduced by a gigantic amount. Now consider what it means in 5 years when the money's gone (even if she spent as frugally as normal, living on $12k per year tops), and you know she's going to either become homeless or severely dependent on the state or likely a combination of both. That's horrible for her first and foremost, and it doesn't help us or our society, either. Lead played a big role in this. Hell even outside of the 'bad decision', a normal person who lost out on $1m in benefits could still go to work, live a normal life. She can't because she's damaged by lead. (it doesn't talk about it deeply but it says for example she can't live alone or work).
- vsync 11y ago> In a lawsuit dismissed in March, Access Funding accused Blumenfeld of interference with business practices and unjust enrichment. Wow.
- sachingulaya 11y agoThis is a substantive claim in spite of the accuser. The independent advisor should not be helping their client solicit other bids...not very impartial.
- aaron695 11y agoI'm surprised that people buy into this rubbish that lead paint has actually caused these health issues. True, irrelevant point to the article but points to a broken system on many levels including understanding and correctly dealing with mental health issues.
- johnloeber 11y agoWhat are you even saying? Lead is very well-established as a neurotoxin.
- mirimir 11y agoThe epidemiology is solid. Some cohort studies ran for decades. They followed lead levels in blood and bone. They tested intelligence and documented behavior. They tracked educational and criminal history. The neonatal brain is exquisitely sensitive to lead.
- aaron695 11y agoAnd this is why juries don't work. It is probably banging my head against a brick wall, but seriously whole generations had lead based paint and lead products. Rich and poor. It's even in the water supply - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2004/05/heavy_metal.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa... But these people with lawsuits had these enormous effects only thanks to lead, right. Even the whole lead in petrol thing is up in the air, we are not sure if it has made a difference. These issues are around poverty, not magical beans like evil 'lead'.
- mirimir 11y agoThe "magical bean" for lead paint is poor maintenance. There's also the perverse fact that flakes of old lead paint are sweet. So kids suck on them like candy. Especially if they're hungry. I do agree that poverty makes it worse.
- DanBC 11y ago> Even the whole lead in petrol thing is up in the air, we are not sure if it has made a difference No, that's wrong. We know lead in petrol was very harmful to a lot of people. The thing that is "up in the air" is whether lead in petrol was responsible for increased crime rates, especially increased violent crime rate; and whether removing lead feom petrol was responsible for the reduction in crime rates. It's not an outlandish bizarre hypothesis because we know how harmful lead in atmosphere is.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 11y agoThe big winner overall in this sad story is arguably the lead industry. They escaped liability for many decades.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- erikb 11y agoI agree with all other people who say that she probably may be able to void the contract if she a) can pay back the money b) knows that it's possible to void a contract. But that is discussed already enough in the threads here. So I want to add a new point. Should she trust such a contract and its maker? I think even if you are a little brain damanged and unable to read you should have some basic ability to determine if you can trust someone. I mean he came to her home and gave her food. That basically screams "I want to F* you" in one way or another. And when next he introduces some opportunity you can know exactly that this is where he's trying to cheat you. It's basic survival knowledge to recognize that. If you are a young white man, you might not have experienced such kind of situation before, but this structure of getting tricked is very common and not too hard to recognize, no matter where you go or what the trick is. After getting cheated a few times you recognize it as easy as a red light on the other side of the street that stops you from crossing over. If that girl doesn't have that much brain capacity she can't live alone. And if she has she certainly must learn to recognize that.
- dugditches 11y agoThe second paragraph of the article states she can't live alone: "She says she can’t work a professional job. She can’t live alone. And, she says, she surely couldn’t understand this letter." You can't apply your logic and thought process to someone with mental or development issues. It's ignorant.
- erikb 11y agoThen how could she face that person alone? If you have a caretaker he reads your mail, he even might answer your phone, and he certainly should see that not just him and you are sitting in the room, but another dude with a steak he's feeding you. That's how I came to presume she would have some kind of autonomous agenda.
- scotty79 11y agoWhy is something like disability insurance checks even transferable?
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoKudos to the WP for such a good investigative piece. Great job, guys. I've been thinking about this problem for several years, ever since I saw my first late-night TV commercial with lawyers offering quick cash in return for structured payments. It was obvious that these folks were not pitching a financial service for people to think about very seriously before taking; they were pitching fast cash for people who can't manage their money. Taking financial advantage of the cognitively-impaired is a very thorny problem. I think it's easy to come up with some kind of armchair policy that sounds good but would cause more problems than it would solve. But hey, this is the internet, so everybody gets to take a whack at it. This is my take: if you're receiving a structured settlement for permanent cognitive damage, your cognitive damage does not go away simply because you've decided to take all the money in a lump sum. You end up stuck with the same problem, only now you've lost any chance of remedy. So perhaps the thing to do is to make structured settlements a legal requirement of the lawsuit and not simply a civil one. In other words, the judge rules that party X will pay party Y so much per month for so many years and that debt is not transferable by party Y. They're stuck paying them so much, and they're stuck paying them so long. A check must show up each month made out to Y (and Y must have full control over what to do with it) Y can still make bad financial deals, but they get that money every month no matter what. If Y owes a bunch of people money? They can stand in line and wait on Y to decide how they want to spend their monthly allowance. It's not a debt in the traditional sense, it's an order for one bunch of folks to give another bunch of folks money every so often. Probably a lot of problems with this solution also, but something needs to be done here. This is a terrible situation. EDIT: change in text to correctly source the article
- dangerlibrary 11y agoThe article is in the Washington Post, not the WSJ.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoCorrected
- doki_pen 11y agoA highly visible, more competitive market would go a long way to making things more equitable. Someone should make settlement.ly.
- halviti 11y agoVictims that likely don't use the internet or understand what a settlement is aren't likely to find such a service very beneficial.
- argklm 11y agoAnd the most absurd thing is... It's all legal. I wonder how this state has forgotten to protect who absolutely need protection. They are people, and I know it, but severe mental impaired persons selling their "possessions" to shady companies, it's not the best thing to leave unsupervised. The state also seems to consider the economic aids as a salable good. They should be shielded by these companies. Mental impaired persons are the weakest in resisting this type of aggression. The aid should be destined for the well being of people and not their ruin.
- ssanders82 11y agoIt would be helpful to know at what interest rate they are discounting future payments. When you're looking 50 years in the future, even a few points makes an enormous difference.