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from sparr

The tyranny of civil court clerk delays

I'm sure that when a legislator looks at a new schedule of fees for motor vehicle violations, it seems sensible. e.g. $50 for 10mph over the limit, $100 for 20mph over, $200 for 30mph over, etc. I sometimes wonder if anyone in that decision making process worked through the math of all the other fees that get added on to every ticket, and seriously considered that they were actually saddling all three violations with $400+ tickets that are mostly indistinguishable. I open with this example because I expect most people are somewhat familiar with speeding tickets. My actual topic here is something a bit more niche but still conceptually related, procedural delays in civil court proceedings.

Massachusetts has laws establishing various timelines for parts of a civil court proceeding. Other states as well, but I'm going to focus on MA here since that's where most of my experience has been for the last few years. At some point, dozens of legislators (or their aides, at least, hopefully) looked at these laws in draft form and decided “yes, these are reasonable timelines for a person to wait between step X and step Y of the legal process”. They did this for many steps of many different processes, some very common and some very niche. However, they left some gaps, some intentionally and some unintentionally.

The next step in filling those gaps involves court rules and standing orders. The Supreme Judicial Court adopts rules that apply to each of the lower courts, e.g. the Superior Court and the Housing Court. Some of those rules are court-specific, and some apply to all of the Trial Courts. Then each individual court has its own leadership that issues standing orders. Between these various rules and orders, a lot more timelines are established, including small scale things like motion opposition deadlines and large scale things like “how long can a case take from start to finish?”.

However, there are still some gaps left after applying all of those layers of laws and rules and orders. And there is often little to no enforcement mechanism for those timelines. So we end up at the final layer of authority, the court clerk. As best I can tell, no one at a higher level intentionally allowed the clerk this much authority, it just fell into their lap through happenstance and tradition.

Here's an example: When a landlord is evicting a tenant, and every step of the decision process is complete, and the court has issued a final ruling that the tenant must leave, the tenant might still not leave. The landlord has to hire a sheriff to escort the tenant and their belongings from the property. The legislature has decided that the landlord has to wait 10 days after the court decision to get the paperwork for that next step (M.G.L. Chapter 239 Section 5 (a) “An execution upon a judgment rendered pursuant to section 3 shall not issue until the expiration of 10 days after the entry of the judgment”). I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable amount of time to the people writing and voting for that law. It matches the deadline for the tenant to file an appeal, and that makes plenty of sense. But here's the catch... there's no way to get that paperwork on day 11, or even on day 15. The court clerks have decided that the request for the paperwork can't be filed until day 11, and so it won't be considered or potentially granted for perhaps a week or a month after that.

Harkening back to the first paragraph, I don't think those legislators considered this. I'm pretty sure that they meant for landlords to wait 10 days, not 15 or 20 or 30 days. All of the laws and rules establishing timelines measured in days or weeks lose almost all meaning when the clerks deny any potential ability to pursue those ends without additional delays of weeks to months.

This is, of course, not limited to evictions or landlord/tenant law in general. I've encountered this situation in multiple courts at multiple levels on multiple types of cases. It continues to confound me that we tolerate this sort of obvious divergence from the intended effects of our laws about court processes.

PS: Maybe next time I write about clerk overreach it will be the tale of the SF Superior Court Appellate Division Clerk that refused to let me file an appeal because the court hadn't assigned a case number to my case or any other cases like mine.

 
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from tagesbuch

During #39c3, an initiative for #digitalindependence was started. I welcome this attempt to promote alternatives to mainstream software. On every first Sunday of a month, people are motivated to switch from ... to ... well, at this point my dissatisfaction starts.

On the website, the movement is targeting “ultra-rich people” and “monopolistic position”. Of course, everybody understands the anger against those extremely wealthy persons who own and control popular communication platforms, and lauded the authoritarian on 4 September 2025.

Unfortunately, this directs much of the protest against tech companies, us companies, and it promotes a linux distribution that deliberately declares the licence of software a secondary concern. The former is a gateway for populistic anti-americanism, and the arguments and recommendation miss the point of the GPL.

The GNU General Public Licence (GPL) is a very clever move. On the one hand, it enables a user to use, learn about and modify the software. On the other hand, it enforces a continuity of these freedoms. Yet, it does not foreclose the establishment of a professional company, and earning gains from success.

Actually, the GPL is a very good example for explaining the difference between a market economy and capitalism. A market economy is based on the exchange of goods and services deemed as equivalent by the actors. The root of capitalism is the power to enforce an unequal exchange between economic actors. Monopolies are an example of such power – so, in this point the diday-initiative is right. But there is nothing wrong with running a company and getting wealthy with free software.

When it comes to the question of the current US administration, it is – as always in politics – absolutely essential to distinguish a government from the society of the nation-state it governs. As a German, I am very well aware of the possibility of political guilt, which derives from silence and passivity in front of obvious politial crimes. Yet, many citizens of the US, and numerous successful companies oppose the doings of the gang of authoritarians that had a common dinner at the White House on 4 September 2025.

One of the big promises of computers, free software and the internet is the building of a world wide humanity, of course including the US. It is important to support the free software actors and companies in the US that distribute and disseminate the tools we all need and want.

The main point is the defence and promotion of the principle of the GPL, which doesn't have to be re-invented and mustn't be sidelined. Almost every user of free software knows that there still is a lot of work to be done. Many computers wouldn't work wit hout #proprietary software blobs. And not everybody is able to afford a computer with completely free hardware (still rare and quite expensive). However, this has to be distinguished from the absolutely unnecessary usage of proprietary multimedia codecs or monopolilistically governed content in the World Wide Web.

I would welcome a more reflexive initiative for #digitalsovereignty instead of #diday.

 
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from sparr

You feel [verb]ed? That's also an accusation and request.

In the sentence “I feel ______“, the part of speech that fills that blank is an adjective, a word that describes a noun. I feel hot; a stove can also be described as hot. I feel sleepy; a cat can also be described as sleepy. I feel uncertain; the outcome of a coin flip can also be described as uncertain. These words are adjectives. These sentences describe my internal personal experience of my state of being. Nouns and adjectives, first person pronouns, the idea of feelings, and sentences of this form exist in most languages.

In English specifically, we also use past and present perfect tense verbs as adjectives. A painted (adjective) thing is a thing that has been painted (verb). A thing that has been improved is an improved thing. A given thing is a thing that has been given. The adjectives in these sentences describe the state of the thing. Even if the thing in question is an animal or person that has an internal experience and might have some subjective feelings, these statements don't necessarily describe that experience. These verb-based-adjective statements also describe some past or ongoing action and tell us about the state of the world. They say that painting happened, that improving happened, that giving happened.

In American English, the bare statement “I feel [verb]ed” always carries the implicit meaning of “I assert that [verb]ing happened”. You cannot say just “I feel honored” without also asserting “Someone has honored me”. Ditto re “I feel confused” and “Something confused me”, “I feel left out” and “Someone left me out”, or “I feel hurt” and “Someone or something hurt me”. The only way to make those adjective statements without the implication of the verb statement is with an explicit disclaimer and acknowledgement that your mental state does not correspond to reality. In my experience, this often sounds something like “I know this is all in my head and it's not based on anything anyone did, but I feel left out”. If you don't make the disclaimer, it's reasonable and appropriate for the other person to interpret the verb meaning of your statement and to respond in that context.

For positive adjectives and verbs (e.g. honored), that's the end of the story. Ditto for neutral valence verbs; you might say “I feel observed” without necessarily conveying any additional obvious meaning or purpose beyond the feeling existing and the observing having happened. For negative verbs, there's another layer. The more negative the verb is, the stronger the implied suggestion that the person doing the verb shouldn't do it and the request that they not do it to you. You cannot say just “I feel neglected” without also conveying “The person that neglected me should not do what they did [in the context in which they did it] to me or in general”. Ditto “insulted”, “injured”, “burned”, “abandoned”, “hurt”, “upset”, etc. If you want to express your feelings of this sort without suggesting the person should not do the things in general, that requires explicit clarification. If you don't intend to ask them to not do the thing specifically to you, that requires even more clarification. Those requests are implicit unless you say otherwise. In my experience, the alternative statement from you often sounds something like “I feel hurt, and even though you did something to trigger it I know that you aren't responsible for the hurt. You should keep doing what you're doing.”. If you don't make the disclaimer, it's reasonable and appropriate for the other person to interpret the request/suggestion meaning of your statement and to respond in that context. Once you've been made aware of these implications to the things you say, to ignore them would make you responsible for the consequences of the ensuing miscommunications.

Every time I have a discussion about this topic, many people disagree about the certainty of these implications and the reasonableness of responding to them. And yet, every time I ask for counterexamples, they come up empty. So, before you make that sort of response here, please ask yourself, have you ever told someone just “I feel hurt” (re their actions) and not also intended or wanted or expected to convey the meaning of “I request that you not repeat that action (in that context) toward me”? Have you ever told someone just “I feel disrespected” and not also intended or wanted or expected to convey the meaning of “You should not repeat that action (in that context), in general”? Examples of either of those sorts would go a long way to kickstarting a productive discussion on whatever disagreement we might have on the implied meanings I've described above. In the absence of such examples, or some other argument that I've failed to think of on my own, the only conclusion I can reach is that these implications are reasonable to interpret from the original statements.

On a meta level, it says something about me, personally, that I observe this pattern and make use of it in interpreting others' statements and that I think and write and attempt to educate about it. My awareness of this thing affects my conversations about feelings, often in ways that the other people involved think they would prefer to not be. In that sense, I am sorry for spreading this infohazard to you. But that doesn't outweigh the harms caused by people not recognizing this pattern and these implications, so here we are.

 
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