3647 Protect your rights

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Countering someone's negativity with your positivity doesn't work

because it's argumentative.

People don't like to be emotionally contradicted and if you try

to convince them that they shouldn't feel something,

they'll only feel it more stubbornly.

--  Peter Bregman --

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Well, about a week ago I saw the first neighborhood house and yard decorated for Christmas, multicolored lights strung up all over everything.  I guess I can understand why they'd want to do it now, rather than wait for freezing temperatures and snow, but the distaste and sinking feeling I had upon seeing them surprised me.

I hate hate hate those gaudy displays. It ruins the whole Christmas thing for me.

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I've got a bunch of eBooks on my Kindle and a few more on the Nook.  I'll bet lots of people have huge music collections on iPods or whatever.  Did you know that if you die, you may not be able to leave those collections, unlike vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and real paper books, to your heirs?

You paid a small fortune for those collections, and it all goes poof when you are no longer around.

It appears that you don't legally own the bits and bytes you paid for.  Your account purchased the right to read, watch, or listen to them.  When you die, your account is terminated, and that terminates any right to the materials.  Story at http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-08-23/finance/33336852_1_digital-content-digital-files-apple-and-amazon.

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Something else to watch out for if you have a PayPal or an eBay account.  The user agreement says that if you have an argument with the companies, you abdicate all rights to sue them and can't join a class action suit.  You have to go to binding arbitration.

Now this is bad.

• That leaves you out in the cold paying your own legal bills, going up against a corporation with an in-house legal department.
• They might do the same nasty thing to hundreds of thousands of people, but very few will take it to arbitration.
• This means that even if they lose every single one of those arbitration rulings (and arbitration rarely goes against the corporation, since the arbiters are not required to rule according to laws), it costs them relatively little, and therefore there's no incentive to change their practices.

Corporations LOVE arbitration!

Yeah, class action suits enrich the lawyers and rarely result in any real money for the damaged parties, and that's why people hate class action attorneys, BUT they DO make the offending companies change their practices.  It hurts them financially, but even more from bad publicity.  You can't do that all by yourself, and definitely not in arbitration.

Oddly enough, PayPal and eBay will allow you to opt out of that clause, but you must meet the deadline to do it.  You have to write each of them a letter in a particular format, to be received by early November for eBay, and the end of November for PayPal (exact dates are at the link).

Go to http://consumerist.com/2012/10/15/here-is-a-downloadable-template-for-opting-out-of-paypal-arbitration-clause/ for details.

Pass this around.

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Now, I'm a little confused, because when I took a class in commercial law about 16 years ago, it was pointed out to us that you cannot be forced to give up the right to sue.  Even if you sign a contract that specifies arbitration, you still have the absolute and irrevocable right to request redress from the courts.

Did something change?
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1746 Sibling Rivalry, Stage 2

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Interviewee I-missed-the-name, in the Kingston Freeman a few years ago: "If prayer is out of the public schools, it is simply because those in attendance have chosen not to pray. Individual freedom to pray is still intact. What is rightfully missing is the authority to force prayer on those who do not wish to participate."

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Whenever I follow a car at 40 mph all the way down a 55 mph zone, I can't help but wonder what he's hiding in his trunk.
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There's something I've seen over and over in real life, and read here and there in the blogosphere, that seems so unfair.

Many of my peers are dealing with failing elderly parents, or have done so in the recent past. Usually one of the siblings takes on the major burden of caring for them, supporting them financially, arranging for their care, whatever is needed, and usually it's the most successful of the siblings, usually the elder. Or the one who is single, or whose children are grown. The other siblings beg off because they don't have as much time or freedom or money. The one with the time, freedom, and money, takes on the major burden, and they do it without complaint, because they recognize their ability to do so, compared to the siblings.

Then comes the settling of the estate, and the part that really bugs me. You can probably see it coming.

Even if the estate, however large or small, is divided equally among the siblings, the ones who begged off on caring for the parents strongly begrudge the caregiving sibling his or her share, since obviously he or she "doesn't need it as much as we do".

It's as if the other siblings spent so much time and energy over the final years convincing themselves and others that they were too poor and too overburdened to contribute to the care of their parents, that they have to continue that line. Otherwise they might have to feel guilt, so they turn on the contributing sibling.

I've seen brothers and sisters stop speaking over it. I have a friend who has gone into major debt to care for his parents. His widowed mother has now said she plans to leave him the house to cover the debt, and the other siblings are already having fits.

I don't understand people. Not at all.
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1243 SOS - Please, Someone, Save Me!

Saturday, May 12, 2007

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Rochester, NY, suffering an optical migraine, and wishing I could be anywhere else.

I arrived about 7 pm and went directly to the father-in-law's house. Jay's father. I guess he's technically not my FIL any more, I don't know, I sure can't call him my late FIL, and "my late husband's father" is so awkward. Well, anyway, most of the first and second level blood clan was there. Youngest sister (YS) and her husband (YSH) and two daughters, middle sister (MS) and her husband (MSH) and two daughters, and eldest sister (ES) and her husband (ESH).

Of them all, I like ESH best. He's smart and reasonable. ES is also nice, except when she gets insistent, and usually any unpleasantness blows over quickly. She's very like her father - figures that once she's thought something out, she's obviously right and any additional information is superfluous. She'll ride right over objections. Other than that we get along ok. She appreciates all I did for her little brother.

MS I don't know at all. Oddly, Jay didn't seem to know her well, either. It seems like they would have been close in age (ES and I are the same age), but I get the impression there may have been some odd family dynamics. MSH is nice, but I have had very rare opportunity to talk with him - I don't push in, and he's reticent in mixed male/female company. MS completely ignores me.

YS and YSH and their daughters seem to dislike me strongly. I do hold some very small animosity toward her from back when Jay was ill. They live only 30 minutes down the road from us, and several times when Jay fell during the night and I couldn't get him up, I called them to ask for help, and not only did they not answer the phone, but they didn't return the call. (That was before I invented my version of the fireman's lift and could get his 6'3" 245 pounds off the floor and onto the bed myself.)

Before Jay and I were married, when Jay's father came down our way to visit, he always stayed with them. After we were married I suggested that he could stay with us half the times. Pow! We got him 100%! YSH didn't like him, and grabbed the opportunity to pass him off entirely on us.

When I took Jay to the hospice wing when he was in the final stages, I called YS and said that if she wanted to see him before he died (she didn't visit him at home the whole last year) she should come now. Her response was "Oh, well, we've heard that before", and she didn't come.

Jay always said YS seemed to have no opinions of her own. She is in thrall to her husband, and likes or dislikes as he dictates. Jay and I found the two of them incredibly boring. Their only topics of conversation are their girls and not-so-amusing stories abut their animals - an iguana, somewhere between five and seven cats, and three greyhounds - and the three greyhounds go with them everywhere, regardless of their host's preferences.

I wonder if they've ever had an original idea between them.

Anyway, they weren't as polite in their ignoring of me as MS. MS simply didn't see me. YS and YSH, and their daughters, actively shut me out. They didn't look at me, literally turned their backs, ignored any comments I tried to contribute to conversation. It was a very obvious shunning.

Ok, I can see where there might be some old wounds that haven't healed. Jay and I did not initiate contact, back when, as much as maybe we should have (but good grief, they're so BORING!), and there were a few incidents. But nothing that should earn me this animosity.

There's only one thing I can think of, and it bothers me that I even think it, but it's there. I am in the old man's will to inherit Jay's share of his estate. I have not seen the will, so I don't know whether the estate is distributed among the four siblings (three sisters and me), or whether it's shared among the grandchildren, too, and I have no idea how much is involved (although I suspect it is considerable). Worse, ES and I are named as the executors.

I know enough about YSH to know that this galls him to the core. That I am in the will, set to inherit as much as his wife.

I really think that's it.

Happy 90th birthday, Dad. Please have many more.
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