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Michigan lawyers specializing in civil litigation
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Saturday, March 22, 2003
 

Thanks to AnswerGuru, who points us to this amazing site: a complete transcript of twelve sessions of Buckminster Fuller's lectures.  Fuller, it is said, claimed that he could recount "everything I know" in about 40-50 hours, and then proceeded to do so in 42 hours over two weeks.  The transcript, consisting of 568 pages, is available online courtesy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.


7:37:05 PM    

In a widely-quoted comment, Justice Scalia said at a university in Cleveland that civil liberties may be properly curtailed during wartime:

"The Constitution just sets minimums. . . Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."

*      *      *

Scalia did not discuss what rights he believed are constitutionally protected, but said that in wartime, one can expect "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum."

Sheesh.  An incredibly dumb comment.  And he didn't even say "we won't".

I am far from being a Nino-basher. Indeed, his approach to jurisprudence and statutory interpretation is close to but not identical to mine.  But this comment strikes me as, let us say, injudicious.  I don't think he had any idea of the connotations carried by his comment.  Things that are "ratcheted right down" in times of crisis include thumbscrews and the rack. 

There is a reason that judges are expected to approach these issues with a sense of solemnity and deliberation.  Off-the-cuff comments by Supreme Court Justices do not play well in the political arena. 


3:36:37 PM    

Online banking

Did you ever wonder how online banks can make money by offering free electronic checking and bill paying? 

In addition to the normal accumulation of money sitting in accounts waiting for checks to be written or bills to be paid (the cache of cash which makes it possible for all banks to work), the online banks have one distinct further advantage -- advantage to them, disadvantage to the customer. The online payment is immediately debited to your account, precisely on the date you specify for payment. 

If the payee accepts money electronically, it may get to the payee on the same date, but if so this will probably happen at the end of the business day.  If the payee is one which does not, however, then the online bank will print out a check and put it in the mail, where it will take several days to get to the payee, be processed, be presented, and make its way through the Federal Reserve System and back to the online bank, where it is then honored and paid.  Perhaps three, perhaps thirteen days will pass before the online bank has to make good on the check, while the money has been gone from your account all that time.  If you had paid the bill yourself, by contrast, the money would have stayed in your account until the check made it to your bank and was honored.

This small "reverse float", money which is freely available to the online bank and on which no interest is paid, becomes an enormous sum when multiplied over several payees per user and thousands of users per month.


5:51:27 AM    


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