The video has Ed Mansell stating that all the lawyers he spoke to informed him that it would not be financially viable for him to pursue a suit.
Additionally, there is audio of one of the would-be defendants saying that they intend to drag things out as long as possible, basically taunting both Ed and Ben to sue him as they all understand that it is not a viable solution to the problem for Ed.
Part 2 starts with 10 separate $10,000 default judgements won against the store, but they are unable to recover any of the funds.
Ben brings a process server with him to serve new lawsuits against the owners as individuals, and 4 separate times on the same day in the same spot, cops are sent to him. The cops even take the papers from the process server, try to serve the defendant, and then give it back to the process server saying it was refused . After that they don't allow the process server to serve the papers, and then the cops show up the 4th time and Ben is eventually arrested.
Part 2's corruption and civil rights violations makes Part 1 look irrelevant. A lot of the coverage on this is still about the $200k and the lego sets.
Fun part to mention is the officer that takes the subpoena to the would-be defendant is the part of the 3rd set of cops that were sent to Ben's non-moving car that is on public property. The cop's bodycam discussion with the would-be defendant is also fully redacted, for some reason.
After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?), the 3rd set of cops leave and a 4th set of cops shows up, make a phone call to verify that it's a real lawsuit they are trying to serve, question him further, and then after all that Ben is still arrested.
Ben also shows how the body cams are being redacted in ways that they should not be. Due to sloppy redacting, he gives an example where the content of the redacted audio is one cop telling the other that Ben is basically annoying but the thing he's doing that they got called over for is not illegal.
> After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?)
They can't, and I'm surprised the officer wasn't aware of that. Confirm the person's ID, hand them the papers or sit them somewhere and tell them, they have been served. Process-wise, all that matters is confirmation to the court that the person is aware of and was given possession of the documents. If they don't like it and set them on fire, that's not the court or the server's problem.
I think there's also generally a process for someone avoiding being served. Ie if you can prove they're trying to avoid being served, that is per se evidence that they are aware they are being served and can be considered as served. Iirc, it's not preferred because it's way, way cleaner for the court to have a signed document but they can and will do it.
Legalities aside, this is why you'd normal hire someone to do this. The cops don't want to be involved, and especially so for YouTube drama. Hire someone completely unrelated who can show up, be completely emotionally detached and do the "I'm just trying to do my job, man" schtick. They're also much better for contested servings. If one party says the other got papers and the other denies it, there's a "he said, she said". If you hire a professional who doesn't care about the outcome of the case then it carries a lot more credibility.
I didn't mention it in the comment you replied to, but during this whole event including the 4 instances of police, Ben is in a car with a process server he hired to serve the papers. Ben himself stayed on public property the whole time.
The cops even tell Ben to get a process server, and he points out to the cops that yes, he has brought the exact person they described, she's right there in the car with him.
I can't speak for Utah, but I sued a valet for crashing my car in small claims. I was given the option for an additional fee to have the subpoena served by the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department. I think you're better off getting police involved if you can when it comes to serving people. In the case of the video I'm pretty sure he hired a certified process server and the police shut it down.
They lost default judgements because they did not appear. Either they thought it was fake or they thought they'd lose, but they were served and did not appear.
Or they thought that the losses were acceptable to avoid having to make sworn statements about the series of events that are still at issue in the previous owner's case and some events that may very well still be charged by Oregon prosecutors.
Quantum physics guarantees us anything is a possibility. The question is, is it a likely one at all? And the overwhelmingly likely reasons are obvious to anyone with half a brain, given all the surrounding context here.
While this is true at the moment, closing a store and transferring its assets to another store owned by the same people could reasonably be alleged to be fraudulent transfer. The owners don't just get to keep whatever was in the store because they closed it before they paid.
I believe they would need to dissolve the business entity. These default judgments against them should count as debt that needs to be paid before the business is closed unless they declare bankruptcy in court and not like Michael Scott.
A default judgement is still a loss. Why would not they not fight back small claims cases, which would be trivially easy for someone with their resources, if they could win?
They can't even serve papers because they're being relentlessly harassed by Police who have immediately banned them from serving them. In part 2, cops even verify the court case and he has a process server-- but they just refuse to. One of many different cops eventually took the papers to serve them, and ended up coming back saying "he didn't want them."
Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.
I am not stating that I think B&M would win. B&M's original intent was to force Ed and Ben into a pyrrhic victory via dragging out one lawsuit, even if they lost that one suit.
Without being able to run up Ed/Ben's legal costs, trying to defend these suits at all is just a further loss for B&M for no benefit.
I don't think it was the deciding factor, but Ben also sent a fake Guinness award to the store around the same time they were being served. It is within the realm of possibility that they thought Ben was bluffing with the lawsuits and tried to call his bluff just to find out it was all real after they failed to appear.
Nah, the whole Guinness thing was obviously just a bit for the video. Clearly the franchise would not fall for that, when you can easily check that you were summoned to small claims (and they also probably get some form of direct communication from the court I would guess).
Legal costs for a small claims suit is tiny, and would be easily doable for them if they could win it. Again, there is a reason they lost those cases.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. But also please watch the video, they submitted multiple separate claims via different aggrieved parties, this totaled $100k, despite the low individual small claims maxima.
From what I understand ownership of the Lego sets never left the Mansells. The consignment agreement states as much.
Even if we take what corporate says at face value (there was no agreement, or the agreement is null, or it's an agreement that the previous owners agreed to) that still just means that the store possesses property that they do not legally own. Whether or not they legally came to possess the sets seems irrelevant here.
I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how the Mansells ever stopped owning the lego sets.
I watched a video from a lawyer who was explaining some of the legal aspects of this debacle, and this one stuck out. Basically, if the Mansells had filed a form with the Oregon Secretary of State, they would have a much simpler claim. That form basically just says "X company is holding Y merchandise that is mine for consignment". Because they (likely) didn't do that, the process for determining their ownership may be more complicated in certain events, and closure of the store might be on that list. Reasons the new owners and BAM corporate are screwed:
1) they made statements during the seizure of the store that they are aware of the consignment and that will transfer to them
2) they were made aware of the consignment in writing by Mansell in a letter terminating the agreement and demanding return of the merchandise after a missed payment in Nov 2025
3) they sold a set from Mansell's collection after 1 & 2 to one of Mansell's confederates
4) they knowingly removed stickers placed on the collection by the previous store owner to identify it as part of the collection
Even if the consignment was undone, they don't get to just keep the collection. The agreement can almost certainly be terminated, but the collection would then be returned to Mansell.
I believe that's the one thing BAM refuses to acknowledge, they have no legal possesion of the lego sets, that's the beginning and end of it. They are trying their damnest to hide that fact behind a consignment/contract/franchise/corporate/arrests/heroin/lawsuit curtain of smoke.
I don't know how effective the wording of the original consignment agreement would end up if tested in a suit. It reads "Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold".
On the other hand, without the agreement, how can one prove the expectation that the goods were handed over with, at all? Without establishing that expectation wouldn't the ownership of the goods just stay with the original owner at all times?
It would make sense that there are some ways you can abandon property you own in a way that someone else can swoop up and take ownership it without having to give it back, but do any of those potentially apply here?
> The store obviously has an obligation to hand over either money or the goods, but it's not clear that obligation is transient to anyone that ends up with the goods.
It is extremely clear. You are just detailing the buffer being used to pretend otherwise.
In the dragster case, we don't have anything like video proof of the supposed record.
There was an effort to examine the source code of the game and determine a theoretical best time which has been matched but not exceeded.
To explain Todd's record would require some alternative way of having such a score such as proving he played on a prototype/alternate version of the game at the time he claimed to have set his record.
Do note that this case has 0% to do with cheating in video games. The judge listed 5 'imputations' made by Karl which seem to be the main points/infractions and cheating, donkey kong, etc do not appear there.
The scope of the judgement is related to Karl's statements about Billy's interactions with Apollo that ended up to be untrue.
What's cool is a lot of the above terms are specific to NES tetris too. Tetris has a lot of depth and there's a ton of variants out there depending on what you want to get out of playing. Personally I love the TGM series but it's totally different from what you'd think of if you started with NES tetris.
On the base level, it is not very hard to examine a chat log and glean who is being blatantly toxic from the log.
A big problem with games like League of Legends or Dota 2 is that you can easily be toxic or cause your teammates to be toxic without chatting or using voice comms.
There are very common trolling methods that do not require any use of chat with the express purpose of trying to incite toxicity in other players, some blatant, and some not.
However, the bigger problem is that honest mistakes can be misinterpreted by your teammates as toxicity:
Losing a close 1v1 vs your laning opponent
vs
Accidentally going too deep into enemy territory and dying once.
vs
Getting killed while attempting to secure map control for your team.
Vs
Playing too aggressively and overextending and dying many times over the course of a game.
When things like this happen, your own teammates may become upset at your poor performance and begin to lash out.
The biggest problem here is that in these games, it can feel like you have no agency over the outcome of the game when your teammates do not perform at the perceived skill level you have of them.
This is where toxic players become hard to deal with. They will start doing things that will incite toxicity in their teammates while maintaining plauisble deniability:
- Confusing teammates by providing useless or inaccurate information about the current gamestate. (Pinging, map calls, cooldowns, timers, etc - many of these require no use of chat of voice comms)
- Picking on teammates by making consistently selfish plays to their detriment.(Courier stealing, going out of one's way to steal farm from a lower position teammate, unnecessary kill stealing)
- Improper role identification, your team strategically expects you to do X, you do Y. Y could even be better than X in terms of winning the game, it doesn't matter.
All of these above examples can either be common gameplay mistakes or intentionally malicious, but the point is that once your teammates do not trust one another, some will start verbally abusing, while others will begin to make similar mistakes as above (tilting) and lose the game for their own team.
Many players want to feel like they were the influencing factor that decided the game's outcome, and make choices that increase the influence they have on the game even if it might actually lower the chances that they win - and this is what many times leads to toxicity.
I'm fairly interested in the competitive smash bros scene - a common occurrence is that one might record a few hours worth of gameplay after an event and then be too lazy to split the recording into the individual matches, leaving a lot of recorded dead time where nothing is happening.
I learned how to use the gstreamer and opencv libraries to automate recording gameplay only when a game is in progress - it is still a WIP but the basic functionality works.
I'm looking into using a webcam + barcode labels or an NFC scanner to implement a solution to automate naming the players playing each match. If anyone has an idea on how to track something like that I'd be interested in hearing it.
GeekyGoonSquad started doing something similar when they were still around/streaming, and automated the uploading to youtube.
Re: automating the player names, on a non-stream set up, I think it will be difficult to get the names from players in a standardised way. My first thought was webcam + the players venue pass to get the competitors name, but even that is a little fiddly.
I've just been fiddling around with things that can be attached to the end of the controller plugin such as rfid stickers, with a reader of some sort near the setup.
When I was in a coding bootcamp, one of the other people in my cohort was able to get some access to an API for Grammarly, and we worked on a toy project to use the API to 'score' medium blogs:
Site functionality is pretty much broken now, but it's been almost two years since it went online, so I'm surprised they haven't offered a public API by now.
Yes, perhaps to clarify: I mean why not have Elixir be the language that compiles to JS, rather than Elm. Then you only need one language for frontend and backend (in the context of a Phoenix app).
Additionally, there is audio of one of the would-be defendants saying that they intend to drag things out as long as possible, basically taunting both Ed and Ben to sue him as they all understand that it is not a viable solution to the problem for Ed.
Part 2 starts with 10 separate $10,000 default judgements won against the store, but they are unable to recover any of the funds.
Ben brings a process server with him to serve new lawsuits against the owners as individuals, and 4 separate times on the same day in the same spot, cops are sent to him. The cops even take the papers from the process server, try to serve the defendant, and then give it back to the process server saying it was refused . After that they don't allow the process server to serve the papers, and then the cops show up the 4th time and Ben is eventually arrested.
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