And Jenny Robot drew my attention to the story.
How are these people not in prison? I've been through this stuff recently and there's just no way it was anything like this.
I got to the part now where at least some of them were indicted.
The way it was told, it certainly seemed like it could be a national issue (varying by state of course, with some states like NY being better), and if it were, it would be very under-the-radar as a matter of course, with judges rubberstamping because high volume + nobody pays attention + they think of the guardians as selfless saviors - but it didn't as I recall shed any light on whether this is in fact the case. (I searched for incidents in CA and found a bit, but nothing in MSM.)
There's a national association.
The amount of obvious scam calls coming to my parents' house was one of the things that shocked me when I started spending time there. I don't know if they got on a list somehow (they were never scammed) or if that's just what happens when somebody is home to answer the phone all day.
I'm sure there's a steady low level of some level of abuse, nationwide: my guess would be that people don't get put into guardianship frivolously, but that people who need to be in guardianship get looted to a certain extent. But stories like the ones in the article? You'd need a coincidence of bad state laws and literally corrupt/insane state judges, and I still think the first federal court that heard about it would shut it down if the state courts didn't. If exactly this sort of thing is a problem that's widespread at all, I'd be really surprised.
(It's still an incredible scandal that completely justifies the story, but I'd bet it affects at most hundreds not thousands of people nationwide.)
I definitely worry about something vaguely like this happening to my parents (separately, they've been divorced for decades). They're connected enough to other people that it would be noticed quickly, but both of them are 70+ and starting to be marginal - one has the early stages of Parkinson's and seems to have trouble keeping the house clean (and was always kind of a slob anyway), and the other is starting to be very forgetful on a day-to-day scale and may be (I just learned) years behind on tax returns (but is still self-employed and working).
8: I'm right with you there -- divorced parents, late seventies, he's grossly fine but is getting sort of generally vaguer, she's more vigorous and healthy, but is also exhibiting some grossly false beliefs. Both are very independent, and very disinclined to turn control of anything over to me.
I haven't done anything useful or effective about any of this.
How are these people not in prison shot in the face?
As if those are mutually exclusive. Win-win, man, win-win.
You'd need a coincidence of bad state laws and literally corrupt/insane state judges
I'm more pessimistic here, because how can we know? The people are marginalized, medicated, and voiceless; there is very too little mechanism, if it starts, for their stories to filter up to public notice.
If such a confluence can happen in Nevada, it can probably happen in at least 25 other states.
For all that we gussy it up in talk of freedom, a big chunk of American culture believes that it's right and good to take advantage of someone as long as it follows the existing rules of the game. That's American libertarianism in a nutshell, not "freedom"
The people are marginalized, medicated, and voiceless
The thing is, this scam is only worth it for people with assets, so more likely to be fairly sophisticated and capable of getting legal help. Anyone who's actually competent who can get to a phone to call a lawyer/family member before they're forcibly drugged into submission should be able to get themselves out of this. I really don't believe this can happen to mostly competent people who don't actually need guardianship, which is the implication of the story, easily at all.
When you've got someone who does need a guardian, is the guardian likely to be exploiting them? That, I would totally believe is a steady problem everywhere, that's controlled more or less well in different localities.
The fact that this was done in a state that people retire to seems significant. High caseloads and kids often out of state would lead to a system that favors the guardians that make the court process run smoothly.
But you do need professional guardians for some people (e.g. those without families/friends and there are also some people who have families/"friends" that will abuse and cheat them). And also, competence is specific to context. The amount of competence required to manage your day to day affairs without becoming a danger to yourself or others is quite a bit easier to achieve than the amount of competence needed to find lawyer who will protect your interests when you are being uprooted. I don't have any trouble believing this kind of thing can happen to competent people if the judge isn't honest and capable.
My father died in April after he was put in hospice care by Sensible Sister, who had medical power of attorney. Crazy Brother without medical power of attorney objected to my father's care, and hauled a Crooked Lawyer to my father's bedside the day before Dad's death to get him to sign a new medical power of attorney.
I am executor of the estate, and Crazy Brother a few weeks ago forwarded a bill from the attorney for this service that I do not intend to pay. At my instruction, the Estate Lawyer told Crazy Brother that a forwarded bill is insufficient, and if Crooked Lawyer wants to be paid, he needs to file a claim with the estate.
I am assuming that Crooked Lawyer isn't actually all that crooked, and won't bill us for seeking power of attorney from a man who was barely mentally functional and possibly not physically functional enough to even sign something. (I have no evidence that Crooked Lawyer and Crazy Brother actually succeeded in getting my father to sign something -- no use was made of any power of attorney besides the legit one that my father did sign empowering Sensible Sister.)
But if Crooked Lawyer does bill me, I want to file a complaint with the Bar Association. I haven't read the link yet, but do the lawyers here think that this constitutes a meaningful ethics violation?
It's all so relentlessly awful. Are Anglo societies uniquely terrible at handling aging or is it universal?
I'm pretty sure Crooked Lawyer has a perfect right to bill your brother. Let him pay.
18: I think in Japan they respect the elderly because if the elderly die at home, you can keep getting their pension checks as long as you can hide the body.
Global warming is making ice floes a less attractive option for some cultures.
I don't have any trouble believing this kind of thing can happen to competent people if the judge isn't honest and capable.
It could happen, but you'd need corrupt (either explicitly or functionally) judges, and the first person who managed to hire a competent lawyer should be able to blow the lid off it by getting either to a different state court judge, or to federal court. Hiring a competent lawyer isn't trivial, but I'd figure that out of ten or so affluent (as a marker of social class, rather than that they'd have control of their money), competent people being victimized like this, you'd get one of them getting effective help.
Nine out of ten isn't a very good ratio, but I guess the scammer-guardian business model requires enough victims where that would stop it pretty quickly.
This topic reminds me of one of my local pet-peeves. I think this guy has yet to see a day in prison after being convicted of stealing from an elderly widow he was powering of attorney (power of attorneying?). His basic defense strategy was to drag out the case until it become harder to prosecute and he's still appealing.
I'm so glad LizardBreath is here to provide the voice of reason because I couldn't even read the whole article, I was getting so mad. That guardian is a monster! How can she live with herself?!
Really. Flaying is too good for her (and the others doing the same thing.)
I was nitpicking the article, but the actual events that took place were horrifyingly evil.
Is there such a thing as a Raskolnikov complex about defrauding the elderly for a higher purpose?
I used to work down the hall from the guys who did involuntary psychiatric commitment hearings, and the person being committed gets to be in the courtroom
I didn't realize that old movie about the Kris Kringle case was a documentary.
I don't think you were nitpicking though. Investigative journalists should feel obliged to not just relate horror stories but give some idea of whether systemic change in response is necessary or feasible. State legislators often respond to these stories!
29: And indeed, once the local media started reporting on this story it appears that the legislature changed some of the laws, and the people involved were indicted.
I'm sure LB's right that this sort of thing is only going to happen in a state with both bad laws and corrupt judges, but I don't find it at all implausible that that describes a lot of states with large elderly populations. In that context there's inevitably going to be a lot of legit guardianship cases, which means the system for processing them needs to be efficient, and that creates an incentive for laws with a lot of loopholes and exceptions to standard protections. Once grifters notice those loopholes they'll start taking advantage of them as much as possible, and once they start making a lot of money this way they'll be able to bribe legislators, judges, doctors, etc. to make things even easier for themselves.
How can she live with herself?!
The PA judges who sentenced children to jail in exchange for cash (from the people who ran the jail) managed to live with themselves to such an extent that they sued the state to try to get their pension restored.
I just remembered the whole Harper Lee thing.
And another fruit of horrible and possibly corrupt judges: "rehab facilities" that are actually slave labor camps.
31 is right. Add on top of that many of the places that, for their climates, are attractive to retirees do not necessarily have traditions of believing in the worth of good governance.
32, I did not know. Fuck those guys forever. And our state, for having for-profit jails.
34.1: Also, retirees tend to seek out places with lower taxes, making good governance ever more difficult.
33 could have its own post. Wow.
I seem to remember FL is one of the easier states to get guardianship, so the theory about retirees and governance seems to hold. I was really surprised by this story, because I haunt some Alzheimer's boards, and it seems that it is really hard to get certain things taken care of when a loved one is becoming unsafe. It's hard to get driver's licenses revoked and hard to move someone into an assisted living facility as long as they are semi-aware. I think, though, that it is hard for loving children and their spouses who don't have a lot of money to pay a lawyer and love their parent/spouse (and respect who they were when well) and can't physically force them for medical evaluations and live somewhere without home visits.
Re: the suggestion that someone who isn't a borderline case could get stuck in a guardianship, I suspect it's trickier than one might imagine to escape. I mean, my father is entirely aware and alert, healthy and not that old, and I could see him getting stuck in something like this, at least temporarily if the initial guardianship paperwork went through.
It's hard to get driver's licenses revoked
I could probably think up a convoluted ethical argument to justify ignoring the issue until it comes to the attention of the police without your help. At least, I've done it before.
That was Dad's approach. He literally said to me, "Well, she'd only kill herself." I had to remind him that no, that wasn't the worst possible outcome. She was getting lost. He said, "Well, she normally finds her way home eventually." What the hell, Dad?!
I said it was convoluted, not hard to think up.
Anyway, my dad didn't do anything for my mom's license until the police took it away and we didn't do anything for dad's license ever but there was only maybe six months to a year where it was a problem.
Dad let Mom drive for probably two years after I thought he should have stopped her. He did ride with her fairly often and seemed to think she was fine.
I think it's a lot harder with two people who are barely independent in a place where cars are necessary. In my parents' case, my father drove most of the time anyway when they were together and could have just hidden her keys (by taking them with him to work or something) and it would have been sufficient.
(He also made sure her diagnosis was not formal until after she retired and she is young enough that it was always a tentative diagnosis. I suspect that matters for notification of the DMV.)
Come on, I keep clicking the "remember" button. I am forgettable!
They certainly don't pull your license just for getting a diagnosis. At least not in Nebraska.
When I looked into this, it seemed harder to declare someone in need of guardianship in MN than in FL, though I'm glad that I only went the POA route with my mom anyway. She's probably revoked it by now, but that's no longer my circus.
I found this story horrifying, but also plausibly happening in a number of states. Even if you just look at things like civil forfeiture, it's insane that the state is basically allowed to steal from you, and there's very little effective recourse in many jurisdictions.
I've heard of nursing homes doing this to single people. Someone rather feisty had a caretaker/friend who got a Cambridge city councilor involved and got her out.
There are a lot of indigent people here who have major mental illness and have lawyer guardians. They get paid something. It's not a lot - maybe a couple thousand dollars, but they sign papers without reading them and give permission to the group home people to handle everything. They spend maybe an hour or 2 a year on the person. If you take on a whole bunch of them, it can supplement a bottom-tier lawyer salary.
15: Arizona, allegedly, has strong elder abuse laws for that reason, i.e. so many people move there from out of state.
The link in 33 is also horrifying. I was the surprised the reporter didn't make more of the fact that requiring people to attend church and Bible study in order to stay out of prison is also messed up.
My super crazy and difficult uncle married someone who was just taking advantage of him at the end of his life. He wound up under guardianship. His wife had abandoned him, but as soon as he died, she came and took the body before the kids could get to it.
I thought that the guardian would have had control of that, since the guardianship had been initiated - I think - to protect him from the money-grubbing wife who basically cleaned him out, but the hospital didn't think so.
Did she hold the body from the kids for gain? I don't know what you'd do with the body if you didn't want to provide a funeral.
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/347.html
Via a barrister I follow on Twitter, worth noting that one of the guys in the New Yorker article doesn't just have links with the moderately rich. Some, shall we say, shenanigans with the truly wealthy tax evaders too.
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/347.html
Via a barrister I follow on Twitter, worth noting that one of the guys in the New Yorker article doesn't just have links with the moderately rich. Some, shall we say, shenanigans with the truly wealthy tax evaders too.
54: We have no idea if he was cremated or where he's buried if he was. His kids would have buried him out here in the family plot if they'd had his remains. It was mind-bogglingly crazy.
If anyone wants something a little less depressing, our state Department of Public Health now has a site called Let's Talk Cannabis which advises the public on legalized cannabis use - health factors, what is and is not legal, edibles safety, etc. - in a nonsensationalized way. Well, maybe a bit in the "youth" section.
||
So I got into a huge fight at work with a cow-orker of mine about the necessity of using the Oxford comma. He's from Botswana and did a PhD where most of the commenters here seem to live and his English is quite excellent (really native fluency if I had to describe it, but not my level of native fluency, got me?). But he said he'd never ever seen a comma before a final and in a list of things (we were all group editing a brochure about our place and I was taking the lead as the only native English speaker in our unit). He really got quite vehement said he had an English degree (though his PhD is not in English) and then said cite your authority and I looked at him like wtf? It's called an Oxford or serial comma, go look it up.
And now I have to go meet my parents, Ayn Rand and Jesus.
And it's for sentence like that that we have Oxford commas. It's just obvious to me that you can't have a conjunction separating items on a list. But in fairness to your colleague, it is a question of style, not a rule. That said, you'll take that comma from my cold dead hands.
What I've never understood about the controversy is what's the case against the Oxford comma? I know the arguments for it, but I can't figure out why you'd object.
(Similarly, I don't understand why people get worked up about one versus two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. I'm a two-spacer out of habit and because I like the additional visibility it gives sentence ends, but I don't care much and I don't know why anyone else does.)
My own personal reason for disliking two spaces after a period is because I have non-printing characters turned on in Word. This means I can see the pattern of spaces which show up as small dots and having two dots and not one after a period breaks a pattern and I'm very into patterns. Anyway, actual space generated by one vs. two 'spaces' is the same in word processing so it doesn't make sentences stand out more anyway.
I also get annoyed at people who tab to center something and people who don't use the correct hyphen/dash/etc. And I have a very strong preference for spaces on either side of a dash, the singular 'they', capitalizing species names, and punctuation outside quotation marks. -- my dating profile if I was single
punctuation outside quotation marks
Isn't that unfogged house style? It seems likely that Nosflow would be compatible with your dating profile.
I learned to type on an IBM Selectric and don't see why I should change old habits.
If I remember Barry's stories about his parents correctly (apologies if I'm wrong), 61.last cannot be reasonably interpreted as a list of three different elements and so no serial comma is needed.
61: You must immediately apologize to your cow-orker, who clearly has a subtle understanding of English that you lack. The most you can say for the Oxford comma is that it is very occasionally useful for disambiguation; otherwise, it's redundant.
63: Given the age demographics of two-spacers and Trump voters, we will soon be rid of both, and a new golden age will dawn.
hydrobatidae wisely and appropriately shares all of my preferences, but I am compelled to admit that the world will be a better place when we, too, die out and "they" is accepted as singular. Those of you who survive me, please make sure that the correct singular construction becomes "they is," rather than "they are."
70 Such a subtle understanding that he said he'd never even seen it before? You may not agree with the use of the Oxford comma, a topic over which much blood has been shed, but c'mon.
Anyway, actual space generated by one vs. two 'spaces' is the same in word processing
This isn't true, or at least not in the word processor I use (MS Word). People say it a lot, and I'm not sure why they do, but the second space does show up.
"The sands of the Kalahari were stained forever, but the commas at last had been driven out for good."
Those of you who survive me, please make sure that the correct singular construction becomes "they is," rather than "they are."
Following the precedent set by singular 'you'?
Also I have to say that was dickish. But whatever. Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive and now a bit in my cups.
Y'all can change the "you" thing, too. I'll be dead and I won't care.
I can't think of why it would be important to eliminate one character's worth of information just because it's only sometimes necessary. Isn't there an issue where the writer knows what she means, and so is likely not to see the problem where there's a genuine ambiguity?
I was just going to write 72 nearly verbatim but LB got there first.
Although, in my version, I probably would have thrown some swear words in there because I really don't understand why the fuck the one-space Nazis are always saying this when I can see the goddamned difference between one and two spaces with my own goddamned eyes. (And two looks better, so bite me.)
I didn't know that punctuation outside of quotes was another crusade. It's been difficult to get my head around it since I moved here, on top of having to add extra vowels to my words and be all formal in every e-mail.
Writing is difficult because we are obliged to make our meaning clear to others when it is already clear to us. The Oxford comma's impact on that challenge is tiny -- so tiny that we may reasonably say that to a first approximation, it has no impact at all.
78.3: Punctuation outside quotes is something that many non-USians do. It is a more sensible approach for a variety of reasons, but it is against the rules here, so you must not do it.
I am the Last Prescriptivist, and when I am gone, all will be chaos. Dogs and cats will cohabit, and people will no longer be admonished for using "impact" as a verb.
I don't actually ask anyone to change their spacing. I just track changes, find and replace, and pointedly don't accept that change when I give it back.
My co-worker uses all the automatic formatting in Word including the blue Heading 1. It's so weird. He's such a computer science person, and thoughtless/mean, that I assume he's copying and pasting from another program and doesn't care about our aesthetic sensibilities.
Quite a bit more than a bit then.
The origin of this dispute was such a case where there was ambiguity to be avoided.
People who use a double space after a period need to be sent to a re-education center.
Seriously, why do you care? The extra emphasis on the ends of sentences that comes from the additional space is that offensive to your esthetic sense, or what?
It just looks weird to me though I'm certainly of a generation (early X-er) that grew up with it. OTOH in certain formats it doesn't look out of place. Like anything typewritten (old screenplays and the like).
I don't like double-spacing after a period because it looks old-fashioned and not in a good way. But I only actually enforce it when I'm dealing with grant proposals or other documents that have ferociously stringent character-count requirements.
If I could have back the dozens of hours of my life I have spent editing down proposals and reports because people didn't take the character-count requirement seriously and now it is 9:51 p.m. and the online portal closes at midnight I would be a happier woman.
My father still uses an apostrophe in front of 'phone. That seems as old fashioned as "to-day" in my eyes.
I myself still hyphenate "e-mail" most of the time.
I used to think two looks better. But after a while it annoyed me. Yes, part of that is the "river" effect that occurs in any sufficiently long work. It also just seems too spaced out in a way that lets the eye wander. My understanding is that it only came about in a certain technological environment that doesn't apply any more. God forbid you use it on monospace, of course. As for punctuation outside of quotes, I have started getting in the habit of it, despite being trained to keep punctuation inside, as it has disambiguated a few cases for me. It's especially useful in programming contexts.
My understanding is that it only came about in a certain technological environment that doesn't apply any more.
Not liking the look of two spaces is fine, but I think this is a version of the same weird (but very common) story hydrobatidae was telling. There's a lot of 'one space is better than two now because computers!' and I've never heard it make sense.
One space is better than two now because of overpopulation.
I've never heard it make sense.
Kerning permitted by modern computers makes one space more appropriate. Here's a lucid explanation of how that works.
But the deeper issue here is that you have to have rules goddamit. We must enforce conformity because decoding symbols on a page is difficult, and anything we can do to make the code more uniform is helpful.
Signed,
The Last Prescriptivist
The explanation saying that in some, but not all, proportional fonts, the writer thinks one space looks better than two, but if you've got a lot of abbreviations double-spacing at the end of sentences probably still makes sense?
I spell Hallowe'en with an apostrophe like I'm some sort of ancient crone (true).
LB, I tested the one vs. two space and you're correct in Word that it looks different. Which is what I get for going with randomly heard explanations. I personally don't get why people want my spaces between sentences to look different than my spaces between words.
Because the break between words is less significant that the break between sentence and sometimes period-space happens without a sentence having ended.
It's not a huge deal for me -- that is, I have no impulse to change anything written by single-spacers. But a period is a small, subtle character; I find that making the end of a sentence a little more visually obvious makes the text more readable. This might be more of a thing for me because I'm a skimmer, and I'm often not actually reading every single word in the sentence in order, so making the length of the sentence more visible on the page helps with not getting lost.
I feel like giving in and using proportional fonts is enough of an accommodation computer typography. I like my two spaces and I use them there even though I'm perfectly aware that HTML doesn't give a shit.
I have no impulse to change anything written by single-spacers.
Me neither. And when I'm writing with a character limit (grants, abstracts), I do not use the second space. But I like the second space and don't see any reason to retrain myself to not use one when I want one 99.9% of the time I type.
Oh, yeah. I double-space comments here because that's what my thumbs do, despite their not showing up.
The obvious solution to the problem of spaces after periods is for everyone to self-edit so severely that each communication consists of a single sentence.
Oh, yeah. I double-space comments here because that's what my thumbs do, despite their not showing up.
Somebody should take a couple months of unfogged comments, and train a neural net to identify commenters' styles (and then, ideally, read new comments and say, "there's a 92% chance this was posted by LizardBreath") . . .
The obvious solution to the problem of spaces after periods is for everyone to self-edit so severely that each communication consists of a single sentence.
Multiple parenthetical clauses are still okay, right (why wouldn't they be)?
Post your code so we can compare with ours please
101: Were you around for the great anonymity bloodbath, way back in the day? Some people popped out, but most of the commenters write a whole lot like the rest of the commenters.
103: It makes hitchhiking a bitch and a half.
101: Were you around for the great anonymity bloodbath, way back in the day? Some people popped out, but most of the commenters write a whole lot like the rest of the commenters./i>
I was (and commented), and I was completely unable to identify anonymous commenters. But your comment about double spacing made me think that there might be syntactical styles which don't stand out to a reader but which would be picked up by computer analysis (in the same way that facial recognition software is paying attention to very different cues than people do).
64 And I have a very strong preference for spaces on either side of a dash
You monster.
LaTeX of course puts extra space after sentence-terminal periods, but ignores the number of spaces you actually type. The terrible thing is people who forget to replace the space with a ~ when they type something like Dr.~Smith, and then LaTeX puts extra space there because it thinks it's the end of a sentence, and it looks awful.
Here's a challenge -- figure out how this sentence should be punctuated.
One of the last true purveyors of classic heartland rock and roll, Petty would record 13 hit albums with his longtime band The Heartbreakers (with whom he had just completed a 40th anniversary tour that he had been claiming would be their last major go-around), three as a solo artist and two each with The Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup he co-founded with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, and Mudcrutch, a reconstituted version of his first group that finally released its first album in 2008.
110 etc.: This is all in the ballpark, but can we have an active thread where you all literally do my job for me? Then I can procrastinate by watching Tsai Ming-Liang or reading Dreamland* or something.
*I am actually doing this
FWIW, the sentence caught my eye because of the discussion of the Oxford comma, I was trying to figure out if it should have a comma after "Roy Orbison", and then I decided it had other problems was well.
Here's a challenge -- figure out how this sentence should be punctuated.
Without the spaces around your em dash.
Wait, the em dash was a red herring. Take it out and put in a colon.
80: people will no longer be admonished for using "impact" as a verb.
If I am younger/luckier than you, I vow to keep this flame alive on your behalf.
Oh but wait...
Kerning permitted by modern computers makes one space more appropriate.
That is incorrect. And the link is exactly the kind of thing that brings the fuck-you to this (stupid and fun!) argument. So never mind; after you are gone, I will impact the use of 'impact' as verbally as possible, out of sheer spite.