http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...
Disabilities Act Prompts Flood of Suits Some Cite as Unfair
By MOSI SECRET
New York Times
APRIL 16, 2012

The lawyers are generally not acting on existing complaints from people with disabilities. Instead, they identify local businesses, like bagel shops and delis, that are not in compliance with the law, and then aggressively recruit plaintiffs from advocacy groups for people with disabilities.

The plaintiffs typically collect $500 for each suit, and each plaintiff can be used several times over. The lawyers, meanwhile, make several thousands of dollars, because the civil rights law entitles them to legal fees from the noncompliant businesses. ...

All of those suits were filed by Ben-Zion Bradley Weitz, a lawyer based in Florida, who has a regular group of people with disabilities from whom he selects plaintiffs. One of them, Todd Kreisler, a man in a wheelchair who lives on the East Side of Manhattan, sued 19 businesses over 16 months — a Chinese restaurant, a liquor store and a sandwich shop among them. ...

Mr. Weitz is leading the charge into New York’s courtrooms. Since October 2009, he has sued almost 200 businesses in the state, mostly in Federal District Court in Manhattan. He has eight years of experience filing these suits in Florida, where his practice does not seem to be lagging. Two weeks ago, he brought claims against four Tampa businesses — a strip mall, a convenience store, a bar and a print shop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...
Judge Rebukes 2 Lawyers Profiting From U.S. Disability Law
By MOSI SECRET
MARCH 29, 2013

Now a Brooklyn federal court judge has ruled squarely against two lawyers who bring most of such lawsuits in New York, writing in a cutting opinion on Thursday that their tactics lacked expertise, possibly violated the rules of professional conduct and were “disingenuous at best.” The judge, Sterling Johnson Jr., denied them legal fees and took the rare step of ordering them to stop filing such cases. ...

Though such arrangements have typically been shielded by confidentiality agreements, Judge Johnson revealed how much money the lawyers — Adam Shore and B. Bradley Weitz — claimed in fees, typically $425 per hour for a total of $15,000 per case even though the cases were so similar that he described them as boilerplate. The two lawyers had filed as many as 10 cases in a single day.

Are you including checkin, security, bag drop/pickup, and getting to and from the airports? Didn't think so.

Even a stopped (analogue) clock is right twice a day.

Why is parent modded Off-Topic? It's spot-on.

The problem is that you do not have perfect knowledge, and neither do I.

The same people who pay for everything, all the time...

Go watch The Century of the Self , and prepare to have your eyes opened.

To be fair, I wouldn't be much affected by the restriction, since I'm allergic to crustaceans.

Still, it's petty and mean-spirited and I hope SNAP users are able to hack around it in some way, just on GPs.

I just wish the taskbar weather widget actually displayed the temperature. I already know what city I'm in, thanks.

I suspected it was something like that.

Here in Sweden, like many if not most Swedish workers, I'm eligible for something called Rikskortet ("the national card"). It's a card that works like a credit or debit card that gets charged up with (in my case) about $250 (1600 SEK) every month. If you take the benefit, you're taxed on half the amount. You can use the card to make purchases of food and/or beverage at most places where plastic's accepted--café, McDonald's, grocery store, fancy restaurant--doesn't matter. No restrictions on what sorts of food or beverage that I'm aware of, either, other than that it can't be used to buy alcohol, which seems fair enough.

The longer I stay away, the more the US seems to be run by complete assholes.