Supreme Court turns down investor class-action lawsuits

[Nords]

Looks like the Supreme Court thinks that shareholder class-action lawsuits in the states are a waste of time... for the legal system anyway.

On one hand it removes a litigation threat from big businesses. OTOH it keeps investors from piling in and then claiming they were too stupid to understand what they were doing in the first place. But I think that the typical class-action member was a shareholder who was pushed into it by a lawyer to see what he could get.

It doesn't seem to keep individual shareholders from filing suit. Of course few have the assets or the resources to do so.

So maybe this will cut back on the ambulance-chasing by the financial legal industry, which isn't such a bad thing. As for the poor retail investor, the brokerage & investment firms care for them as much as they ever have. Caveat emptor.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I dont think I ever saw a class action lawsuit that benefitted the people who got screwed anyhow. I've certainly participated in a few of them. In one case, defective siding on my mcmansion. I got a check for a couple of hundred bucks. $8-10k for new siding. Gee Thanks.

 

[Andre1969]

A few years back, either my grandmother or mother (forget who owned it at the time) ended up being the beneficiary of a class action lawsuit against GM, for owners of those pickup trucks with the "saddle tanks" mounted outside the frame rails. You know, the ones you have to hit at around 73 mph to get them to blow? Or use an igniter, like Dateline did? :

In the end, we got a rebate voucher for $1000 off on a brand-new GM product. After a certain timeframe it went down to $500, and then expired. I think it just expired recently. Anyway, I still have the truck, and couldn't care less, really, about the lawsuit. That $500 or even $1000 rebate would've ended up costing me more like $15-16K or more if I went and bought a new truck with it!

 

[Robert the Red]

I once got about $600 from a class-action settlement related to title insurance premiums.  Until then, wasn't even aware of the lawsuit.  It had something to do with un-notified kickbacks between the real estate agent and the title insurer.  Was the lawsuit justified?  I have no idea.  But I cashed the check.

 

[REWahoo]

My deceased brother may have been an exception to the poor pay offs for class action lawsuit participants. He received almost $300,000 in a class action suit against State Farm Insurance several years ago, shortly after he retired. But I've never heard of anyone else collecting anywhere near that kind of money from them.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Usually its one free cd/movie rental or a coupon for $10 off your next version of windows...

 

[Nords]

... or a coupon for $10 off your next version of windows...

And we all know what inflation will do to that coupon while we're waiting for the next version of Windows.

Hmmmm... but if it's a much better version of Windows, shouldn't there be a hedonic adjustment to the value of the coupon?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Nah, that'll just get used to drag down the coupon on your ibonds and tips so you cant afford the rest of the cost of the s/w. Its a win/win.

 

[Nords]

Nah, that'll just get used to drag down the coupon on your ibonds and tips so you cant afford the rest of the cost of the s/w.  Its a win/win.

What a relief. I wasn't sure how to account for having a 64-bit chip with a flawed 64-bit OS and no 64-bit software to run on them.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Easily. Take your current application performance and decrease it by 5% or more.

Same thing happened when we went from 16 bit to 32 bit. Only everyone was so excited to get their snazzy new 32 bit processors that by the time they noticed they were slower than molasses running uphill on a cold monday morning, the clock rate came up high enough to compensate for it.

 

[Nords]

Easily.  Take your current application performance and decrease it by 5% or more.

Gosh, I just assumed that was the effect of running Quicken & TurboTax at the same time.

Thanks to this board, I've managed to avoid using either one of them today!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Well, the 32 bit vs 16 (and the 64 bit vs 32 bit ones as well) have more registers and some other potential performance improvers, but overall, everything being equal, apps run slower on 'wider' processors. The very simplistic and not entirely accurate (but good enough) explanation...most of the stuff the poor cpu has to do involves moving twice as much...instructions, addresses, etc are all now 64 bit instead of 32. So unless you're using a specific enhancement that is offered by the 64 bit processor (which usually has nothing whatsoever to do with its "bitness"), its probably going to run slower.

Unless your app requires more than 4GB of ram to run, in which case the longer addressability of the 64 bit processor will help.

At a higher clock rate, with faster ram, with optimized operating systems, drivers and applications, it'll end up faster. Nearly none of that has to do with the 'bitness'.

This is why Intel resisted doing 64 bit. It really doesnt make sense at the desktop and barely at the server...at least for a few more years out. Then 3-5 years for the software to catch up.

It never ceases to amaze me when I look back at the devolution of a thread and how perfectly rational the walk away is. Then again, sometimes its just bombed with a boob or a squirrel or beaver.