21 Comments
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For the record I did not write this episode title

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As somebody who literally subscribed because josh promised me continued use of the word taint, I can only say capitalism is working.

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What a title though.

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The idea that you could sue someone for enticing your employees to break their contracts and go work somewhere else is new and surprising to me. Don't companies compete for talent all the time? I feel like I'm missing some nuance of when a line is crossed.

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You can, and it's been done, but it's very hard to prove culpability on the part of the competing company. You have to show a blatant and consistent pattern of poaching, not a one-off.

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Most people (in the US anyway) do not have any sort of work contract. The employer or employee is free to terminate the relationship at any time for most any reason.

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“About as effect as suing the AG... in a food court”. I’m dying ☠️😂

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"So we're gonna be indicted?"

"If I'm lucky."

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I never heard the word "venue". What up?

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Could you explain how moving assets to an entity called “trump organization II” can help you “hide” assets? Doesn’t seem to be hard to find. Although, probably still better than running a scam through a company called fraud guarantee.

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And I’m listening to back episodes…. It’s discussed and the same joke was made…

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hey gang. Having trouble logging in plus curious to know how regularly or not episodes are planned?

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Hi Joe. Serious Trouble will be released at least 40 times annually, though we're currently ahead of that pace as we've come out nearly every week since launching in June. We'll need more detail to assist you with a login issue -- please write to RICOhotline@serioustrouble.show and we'll see what we can do to help.

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An item - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.618763/gov.uscourts.flsd.618763.175.1_2.pdf

So, accusing Dearie of ethics violations for asking NARA about their standard practices with respect to the PRA: good move or bad move?

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This isn't really in your wheelhouse, but I wanted to bring it to your attention nevertheless.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/tx-court-of-criminal-appeals/1972621.html

Quick summary:

Man has long-term affair with married woman. Woman asks man to go to her house and feed the cat. Husband shows up while cat is being fed and attacks man with a knife. Man shoots husband, injuring him, and flees.

Man is charged with burglary and aggravated assault.

At trial, judge does not allow man's attorney to discuss self-defense at any stage during the trial and does not allow man to mention the affair or any evidence that the husband may have known about it prior to trying to gut man like fish.

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Are they still married? Who got the cat?

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I haven't been able to find out anything about the case or the people involved except for this appeal and the first one in 2017. No local news coverage or anything.

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re: Twitter’s current uphill battle with advertisers.. it is absurd for Elon to blame anyone for “forcing” or “pressuring” advertisers to pause their ad spend. The advertisers care solely about getting expected returns on ad spend. That’s it.

If they could get away with advertising various illegal things, they’d do it. Not for a second do I think NAACP (or any other group)

succeeded in pressuring advertisers to do anything (new, different or otherwise).

Instead, the advertisers run the numbers, look at expected returns of putting $X on platform A vs platform B, and decide from there. Ad spend on Twitter has been (for years) a relatively small spend for any of them (vs Facebook, Pinterest, etc). I think Elon’s batshit behavior has simplified the equation for them (and the answer is: put ad dollars somewhere else).

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Just want to say I love this podcast, and listen to each episode multiple times. I am not particularly knowledgeable about the law, so your explanations are enlightening to me.

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In this episode you mentioned how smartmatic and dominion are most likely considered “public figures” for 1st amendment lawsuits. I was curious about that because it seems they are exceptionally unwilling about being so well known, and it seems like that could be a catch 22 if they’re public figures because of all of the negative things that were said about them: if you don’t like a company, create a shitstorm about them and then it becomes legally harder for them to counter defamation arising from the shitstorm because the shitstorm caused them to be public figures.

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It's not because of the negative things that were said about them, it's because the wild and salacious accusations were made about the public business they conduct. This isn't people accusing DC bookstore Politics & Prose of conspiring to steal an election, they're accusing these voting machine companies of using their status as vendors of voting machines to steal an election. The difference between them and Freeman and Moss is that Freeman and Moss were pulled onto a national stage out of thousands of election workers nation-wide - heck, they were very specifically pulled out of a crowd of half a dozen people on the security footage that Giuliani was parading around. Meanwhile Dominion and Smartmatic were already two major national vendors in a relatively small market.

There are cases where it's genuinely harder to call, where people become public figures involuntarily by, say, having a disaster happen to them and are then separately defamed in a way that would be actionable if they were still private persons but isn't because they've become famous, but this isn't one of them. This is really what defamation law is for, honestly: people told absurd lies about these companies, and now the companies can call in the courts as neutral parties to prove that it's all bullshit.

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