There used to be a few companies which did decision-tree style disposal of debts via the FDCPA and FCRA, which basically involve sending letters according to a flow chart and hoping one's counterparty is not as well-organized as oneself on the same flow chart. They worked. Very, very well.
The credit agencies, without any legal rationale for doing so as far as I am aware, started to simply ignore letters which they believed were being generated in an automatic fashion. The decision tree is still the same -- it's the law! -- but to be effective at using it you have to phrase your request in a way which doesn't suggest that you are an expert at writing that request (unless you are a lawyer).
The chief objection to decision-trees-as-a-business-model seems to be that the credit dispute industry was crooked-as-a-barrel-of-fishhooks (welcome to consumer credit, hope you enjoy your stay) and successful in getting people to accept terms like "Pay me $2,000 and I will successfully get you off the hook of $8,000 in debt. Although not particularly relevant to you, this will require writing three letters and waiting a bit."
I think it's more that the letter only holds sway in the first place by the implied threat behind it. If the letter is from a bot, there is nothing to back up the threat.
I happen to know a little about this because my fund is short a publicly-traded company that buys up defaulted credit card debt and goes after the defaulters using shady practices, threatening letters etc. Competition does affect this figure. Back in 2008-09 when the usual competitors in this space didn't have the balance sheet to operate, the few who could buy defaulted debt were making 40-50% returns by effectively buying up debt that they expected to recover $2,000 from for $1,333 (I'm simplifying here because it takes several years to recover the money and there is a present value calculation to be done).
By contrast, fast-forward to last year and at best these companies will only make a 7 or 8% return, barely enough to cover their cost of capital. That return is lowered from the 50% return of the 08-09 era either by the companies bidding against each other and ultimately paying more than the $1,333 for the defaulted debt from the original issuer, or by accepting less than the $2,000 for settling with the debtor. It will not go to zero however - the lower limit is the cost of capital of the companies that buy this debt up.
There is some good news in this space - recent U.S. legislation has targeted some of the shady practices used by these companies (which is one of the reasons we're short the publicly-traded company).
Anyone willing to get this to appeal property taxes for the poor in Detroit?
The city after the 2008 crash hasn't automatically revalued property values. It isn't unusual to be paying $8000 in property taxes on a $25,000 house. Investors are buying the houses at tax foreclosure sales, renting them back to the owners and then getting the property tax bill slashed.
'investors'? Predators would seem to be a better term. Has there been any investigation of whether or not there are links between these 'investors' and the authorities? It seems altogether too easy a way to screw people out of their property and I can see how having a few friends in the right places to deny a reduction at one stage of the process and to expedite it in another could be of use.
The sale of the property automatically triggers an adjustment of the taxable value towards the sale price, so you don't need anybody greasing the wheels on the back end.
Detroit is in dire financial condition, so it would not be surprising if there is reluctance to aggressively adjust assessments. Which isn't meant to justify them not fairly valuing properties, but there is no need for collusion for the situation to arise.
The assessment takes more than just the last sale of the property into account. It is supposed to reflect the market price of the house, so you'd only get a silly $1 assessment if that was in fact the typical price of similar homes.
(The main point of my first reply was that the sale of the home automatically triggers the change in taxable value, the buyer doesn't have to do anything)
My bad. I don't know the specifics but I'd bet against that working. The values are anyway adjusted from time to time (I think each year, but that would probably be mostly formulaic), and can be appealed. Detroit publishes this:
There's your business model right there. For a modest sum, you will buy your customer's house off them for the new market value, then immediately sell it back to them for the same value. $8000 - 2 x property taxes should still leave some margin.
We have one of these in San Francisco. I got an advertisement on my windshield along with my ticket, funny enough. Brilliant advertising. I signed up immediately.
Now I don't even need to scan my ticket in the app. It searches court records and auto-appeals for me.
This seems like a huge conflict of interest. The meter maids are essentially being paid "extra" for every ticket they write now. How is this not the equivalent of a meter maid not writing you a ticket if you give them some cash?
Sounds like a great idea, and the screenshot of the transcript looked very fluid. I'm interested in seeing how governments react once this goes live. I feel like parking tickets and that sort of thing are really a desire to tax driving, by not levying a real tax (unpopular!) and instead picking unlucky people to "win" the lottery and pay for the infrastructure. I don't drive so I could be wrong, though.
As an actual driver, I'd say that parking tickets are typically fair, and easy to avoid. If somebody complains about parking ticket issues, it's a red flag that this person is either honestly incapable of understanding and following simple rules, or this person is just so entitled that they believe the rules should only apply to other people.
I do get a parking ticket now and then, but every one of them was because I ran into a scheduling issue and consciously decided to risk the ticket. And in every case, I could've paid more in advance to eliminate that risk.
I live in New York, and parking tickets make up right around 1% of our city's entire budget, which doesn't seem like a terribly burdensome stealth tax.
This completely depends on where you are located. In NYC there are many, many areas with unclear signs or unclear rules that not everyone knows, and are ticketed because of this. In addition, some departments are simply corrupt.
For example: Seaside Heights, NJ.
A few years back my mom went to the shore and parked in a metered parking area. She put in 2 hours worth of time and went to the beach. She came back 1 1/2 hours later, and the meter was expired with a ticket waiting on her car. She fought the ticket and found out that the meters were broken and running too fast, and the parking officials knew about it.. but continued to write tickets. Their justification was that "All people have to do is dispute the ticket and we will drop the charges." but how many people simply pay tickets without fighting them because of a lack of time? Scumbags.
There are parking lots near me in Massachusetts where to pay for a day's parking you have to go up to a board, find the slot that corresponds to the parking space you have parked in, and you fold up a banknote and shove it in the slot.
Copenhagen is right now moving to a fully digital model: you enter your license plate in the machine or some online app. The people checking the parking have presumably some kind of license plate scanner.
The online app component seems to have been outsourced and thus has slightly different price structure; it also allows you to extend parking remotely.
In Abu Dhabi, UAE you have the option to use either. When you park, you just send an SMS with your license plate and the number of hours. That amount is deducted from your account, which should be created beforehand.
There are only two rates, so you include which type in the SMS. Location is not needed; the parking officers just check cars using a tablet to see if they have the right to park there.
It's implemented in Abu Dhabi city proper. I believe Dubai has the traditional ticket-based system only.
My city (Cincinnati, Ohio) is also moving an app-based street parking model. You pay via phone app and don't have to worry about carrying quarters. There's a petty credit card surcharge of like $0.25, but it's understandable given the low amount of the transaction.
The biggest downside to our system is paying via app doesn't reflect on the meter so you see "EXPIRED" making you feel a little uncomfortable about the whole thing. I wonder if they just don't have a way in the infrastructure to update meters over the web.
Welcome to USA. Why would they replace them when they work just fine, from their perspective. And even when they don't work properly, it's you that pays the price not them.
NYC has mostly moved to a digital system where you can pay with a credit/debit card and get a paper receipt to put on your windshield.
In many smaller cities, however, they still have old meters that take coins and have a timer. There is really no incentive for small towns to upgrade their infrastructure, as requiring coins probably means they will be able to write more tickets, as people increasingly carry less cash.
It varies by jurisdiction. For example, downtown San Mateo has hose tickets you describe while Burlingsme has individual meters, and they are basically adjacent to each other.
I disagree. I live near New York and have only gotten a parking ticket one time. There was construction scaffolding up on the street, covering signs, and new signs had been put on the scaffolding itself indicating it was ok to park there. I still got a ticket, and tried to appeal online, but my appeal was denied. I should have taken a picture with my phone, but I didn't. The fine was excessive (around $200).
NYC is constantly under construction. Signage is blocked by scaffolding, garbage, snow, you name it. I'm sure the residents on the street know exactly where you can and cannot park, but someone unfamiliar with the neighborhood is a target for excessive parking fines. This seems like a patently unfair system that is rigged against tourists and those from out of town.
I'm not convinced this is true in general, even if it is often true. Signage is unclear or absent. Certain departments are probably corrupt or inept.
There are also times when avoiding tickets is basically impossible. My local (and relatively large) community college brilliantly decided to do all three of these things at the same time:
1. Close down the third largest lot on campus.
2. Lease out half of the second largest lot on campus to local businesses.
3. Oversell permits for the remaining parking.
As a result, students began parking on the city streets. But the local residents didn't like that, so the city made those streets permit only (and only gave permits to local residents)* . The college's response was "get here early," which at best is not a solution and at worse, exacerbated the problem by making parking even less available in the early parts of the day. Later they added a meager shuttle solution which they didn't even keep for an entire semester (the parking situation lasted for YEARS rather than months because of theft, lawsuit, and resident concerns about the job site).
Frankly, I would be impressed with anyone who didn't get a ticket over that time period and still managed to make it to classes.
Looking further, the local downtown simply has inadequate parking. The downtowns of other nearby municipalities are the same. It certainly makes political sense to keep parking prices low and just ticket the hell out of violators rather than raising prices to keep demand in line with supply and making consumers and businesses unhappy. I'd be very surprised if these municipalities hadn't worked out the math and figured out which results in more money for them.
*Those roads are still (and probably permanently) permit only, so the only ones really suffering are going to be the short-sighted locals.
This sounds shockingly familiar. Closing lots, overselling permits, closing local neighborhood streets, implementing an inadequate shuttle after years of student complaints.... My experience is not with a community college, though, so I can be fairly certain we're thinking of at least two separate examples of pretty much exactly the same thing going on in different college/university towns.
Why would the locals be suffering if those roads stay permit only? Resident-only parking permits is a very common system and seems to work well (living in Cambridge, MA that has such a system).
There is no purpose to parking on these roads except to visit the local residences. The college is the closest non-residence to these neighborhoods and even that is a hike; students only parked there out of desperation and then walked a long way.
There wasn't even a parking crisis for local residents. The homes there have multicar garages and driveways. They simply didn't like people parking on "their" street. The streets are wide and the parking space is ample.
They've effectively banned visitor parking in the entire neighborhood. And for families with teenagers and multiple cars, they've got to shuffle cars or keep permits updated for no benefit of any kind.
Because once the school fixes their parking situation the problem is gone but the "solution" still needs to be renewed every year and is a headache whenever residents have visitors.
The problem with parking tickets as a tax is it isn't at all fair. If you mega corp CEO or even well paid startup techy, getting a parking ticket of a few hundred dollars isn't that big a deal. To someone on minimum wage it would be a significant part of their income.
I agree, for the most part, but as others have said, parking "legally" can be quite impossible for many. I can understand private parking and stuff, but there is really no excuse for having non-digital parking systems in the 21st century. I hardly ever carry cash, much less coins, so I have zero tolerance and respect for systems that literally nickel-and-dime me. I gladly take my credit card out and pay for parking in the downtown area of my city, because I know I'm not "entitled" to park there. However, a customer willing and technically able to give money (i.e., a person who has the money, but not the form of currency that the parking meter takes) should not be ticketed simple because they do not carry cash.
I have qualms with even digital systems too. The one in my downtown area is digital, but you still have to pre-pay for parking. Sometimes I don't know how long I'm going to be at a place, and it's ridiculous to expect people to come down from the top floor of a 6 story building just to "add more" money to a digital parking meter. Why not sign in once when you park, and sign out once when you leave, and just pay for the time you are there?
Philadelphia began implementing this but typically screwed it up by charging you (and not telling you) a renewal multiplier of cost*n where n is the number of renewal.
Want to pay once and subsequently "feed the meter" twice? Gonna cost 6n vs 3n if you walk back to the meter and pay in person. Want to renew again? Total cost is 10n instead of 4n.
Pretty much everything the PPA does here is direct proof they're not interested in making parking a legal matter so much as a money-extraction matter.
50% of the parking tickets I've been issue have been done so incorrectly.
I've had two parking tickets in my life, in London. Once, only a few months after I got my licence, I parked for 10 mins in a bay where stopping was allowed, but not at that particular time. Fair cop. I hadn't bothered to read the sign.
The second time, I stopped in a 'loading' zone, where loading is permitted for a certain amount of time. I don't recall the amount of time, but I was within that amount of time. When I challenged the person who had written the ticket, he told me that loading was only allowed for commercial vehicles (which is untrue). I challenged the ticket by post, outlining what had happened, and including the parking attendant's inaccurate understanding of what loading bays are for. My challenge was rejected, and it didn't seem worth my time to continue the process.
London, UK.
1 GBP charge to park in a motorcycle bay.
Only possible way of doing it is via a mobile phone, online or by calling. No meter on the street.
Drove to work, parked the motorcycle.
No signal.
Went to work, paid for it when I got back as the signal was back up.
120GBP fine.
Is it unreasonable? Well, I didn't follow the instructions. But I would argue that it's unreasonable to fail to account for the fact that people can't just drop everything and run around for half an hour trying to get in contact with a parking line. I wanted to just glue a pound coin to the seat, to be honest.
My first thought: Apple should buy this company and integrate legal advice into Siri. "Hey Siri, I've just been pulled over by the police." "OK. Here are your rights:"
giving legal advice is always pretty tricky (even if that advice is 'tell the cops that you're invoking your 5th amendment right to silence, and say literally nothing else.')
I believe that legal advice is actually one of those things where liability is associated, and you can probably sue your lawyer for lying about the law to you
Hence all the legal forums with "this is not legal advice"
In Canada (which I believe is very similar to the US in this regard) lawyers generally can't contract out of their own negligence and the advice they give has to be at the standard of a competent lawyer (in the specific area of law). It doesn't have to be right or perfect but it does have to be the kind of advice you'd expect from someone who understands that area of the law.
Although of course, this post isn't legal advice. The actual rules are important, far more detailed than what I wrote, and jurisdiction-specific.
The reason why lawyers write "this isn't legal advice" (like I did above) is because it usually isn't and they don't want people to think it is. Although if it is, they could be liable for it and they want to reduce their effective liability by reducing the chance that someone will treat their legal advice as legal advice. Because sometimes it's not about what the law is but about what people think it is and how they react to what you've done.
Google "professional negligence" for more information.
I suspect the "this is not legal advice" disclaimer has more to do with the unauthorized practice of law. Depending on the state, it may be a crime, although I don't know that I've ever heard of anybody being convicted of it.
Court? Parking tickets (penalty notices) in the UK have their appeals handled by the issuing organisation. Most commonly a city-, district- or county-council.
If you end up in court you've done something very wrong.
Street parking is managed by councils. There are legal requirements for signage and for waiting times before you get a ticket, and you can appeal on either basis.
Off-street parking is often managed by third party businesses, which are various kinds of shady. In some situations there's no legal obligation to pay a fine to the third party. They rely on drivers not knowing this.
There's a separate criminal track where you commit a parking offence, such as obstruction. You can make an informal appeal, but if you want to challenge this seriously you need a very good reason, a good idea of the law, and you may need to attend a hearing.
A bot is ideal for dealing with shady businesses and may make some headway with the council. I can't see it being much use for criminal track appeals.
If you end up in court you've done something very wrong.
Or they've done something very wrong. You can usually seek judicial review of government decisions for such reasons as bias ("they have a policy of giving tickets to black people!"), procedural fairness ("I turned up for my appeal but they refused to let me speak!"), or abuse of discretion ("when I turned up for my appeal, they listened to me, then flipped a coin and said that heads meant that I lost!").
I don't suppose self-driving cars are ever supposed to get traffic/parking tickets?
A more relevant question would be, can the owner/renter of a self-driving car fight the company who sold/rented the vehicle that got a ticket for him/her?
Well, I guess that long before truly automatic cars come to life, we will have cars that you can set to a certain speed and it will just continue driving forward(much like Tesla's Autopilot, but working on any road anywhere). You might ask "well, why don't we make the autopilot follow the speed limits then?". Mostly because in some countries it's not easy to tell when a speed limit ends and in my experience GPS maps are not always 100% accurate. Basically in most of EU the speed limit begins with a sign and ends at a nearest intersection, without any visible sign indicating so. So the car would need to recognize what is an intersection and what isn't - which is difficult even for human drivers, sometimes you have a paved road going off the main road to someone's house, but it's not an intersection so it doesn't cancel the speed limit. Again, it could be solved by having very very detailed maps, but then it doesn't help with roadworks which set up temporary speed limits.
Anyway, my point is that until we have truly, 100% automatic vehicles which take all liability for their actions, vehicles in semi-automatic modes will continue getting speeding and parking tickets.
> Mostly because in some countries it's not easy to tell when a speed limit ends and in my experience GPS maps are not always 100% accurate. Basically in most of EU the speed limit begins with a sign and ends at a nearest intersection, without any visible sign indicating so. So the car would need to recognize what is an intersection and what isn't - which is difficult even for human drivers, sometimes you have a paved road going off the main road to someone's house, but it's not an intersection so it doesn't cancel the speed limit. Again, it could be solved by having very very detailed maps, but then it doesn't help with roadworks which set up temporary speed limits.
My car today already tells me the speed limit. It's based on detailed maps and works great. There are many challenges to self driving cars, knowing the speed limit isn't a huge one. If anything autonomous cars are the opposite of speed demons.
Or you get out and set your automatic car to keep driving round and round the block when you need it again you send it a command from your phone.
Back in the 80's at my employer if the traffic wardens where seen one of the messenger boys would be told to drive the partners cars around the block until they had gone
You say it with absolute certainty, just like people 50 years ago used to say with absolute certainty that we will have flying cars. Well, flying cars are also a huge and unnecessary waste of energy and they didn't happen at all. Automatic cars will probably park themselves in huge automatic multi-story parking lots, like in Japan, why the hell would they be driving around, whoever owns them wouldn't want to put extra miles on them unnecessarily. Even if the electricity to run them was free, you are still using up tires and wearing out bearings , shocks and other elements, it makes no sense.
Tokyo is much bigger and denser than either one of those yet it has them everywhere. I hope you know that I mean those vertical car lifts which pack many more vehicles than your regular car parks, and which can be relatively easily build underground. But you only need to look at Lisbon - a city which had a monumental problem with parking, and they managed to build dozens of huge underground carparks all over the city, under city squares and such, sometimes 10-15 levels deep.
There would have to be some probabilistic model balancing the energy costs of continuing to circle vs. the risk x cost of a ticket vs. the possibility that a legit parking spot will open up.
This is super cool. And even if the parking aspect may have an coming expiration with the rise of more autonomous vehicles. I hope he and others continue to expand this out to a lot more areas quickly.
"Programs such as this one do not, at least in my humble opinion, threaten the legal profession writ large"
Is there someone who has opposite opinion? Where can I read about it? I believe that in ideal world programs should make court decisions and people (like coders) should just translate real cases to universal legal language so that court-bot can make decision.
Thanks for the link. Here is good article about it http://www.nature.com/news/machine-ethics-the-robot-s-dilemm... IMHO, trolley problem is too theoretical. Firstly, these binary events are far from reality based on probabilities and context (like why could this situation occur?). Secondly, the answers to those questions highly depend on the society laws. These problems are missing crucial information what punishment should you expect in both cases. If you don’t know anything how the society will treat these cases then you shouldn’t do anything (for ex., Is it allowed to act like a policeman in this society?) Thirdly it depends whether you are a donor or donee in this society (can you compensate consequences of the damage of your actions?).
I found the titles that I was looking for:Universal moral grammar: theory, evidence and the future;Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong
The credit agencies, without any legal rationale for doing so as far as I am aware, started to simply ignore letters which they believed were being generated in an automatic fashion. The decision tree is still the same -- it's the law! -- but to be effective at using it you have to phrase your request in a way which doesn't suggest that you are an expert at writing that request (unless you are a lawyer).
The chief objection to decision-trees-as-a-business-model seems to be that the credit dispute industry was crooked-as-a-barrel-of-fishhooks (welcome to consumer credit, hope you enjoy your stay) and successful in getting people to accept terms like "Pay me $2,000 and I will successfully get you off the hook of $8,000 in debt. Although not particularly relevant to you, this will require writing three letters and waiting a bit."