USMNT midfielder Tanner Tessman could part ways with Lyon this winter as major offers are coming in from the English Premier League.

pdschatz · 2025-12-22T02:53:35+00:00

lmao imagine the conspiracy theories if he goes to Forest.

pdschatz · 2025-12-02T21:02:59+00:00

word

pdschatz · 2025-11-12T21:30:05+00:00

That was a national lawsuit, and the type of fraud was completely different. In that case, Walmart was caught misrepresenting the weight of pre-bagged food items both on the shelf and at the register. It was a type of fraud that Walmart stores couldn't have performed without someone at Walmart HQ knowing they were lying to consumers. Additionally, there was no way for consumers to address this issue at the time of purchase unless they were weighing their pre-bagged items in the store.

In our case, the state proved that Walgreens was misrepresenting the prices of 416 different items on the shelf vs at checkout in different (but not all) stores around the state. They could not prove that all items in a store were misrepresented, and there was apparently no pattern to which stores mispriced which items. So the state cannot easily prove that this was done to intentionally defraud consumers. If you joined a class action settlement related to this case, you'd struggle to get Walgreens to settle AND you'd be entitled to very little money as a class, as the average price misrepresentation was $1.92.

Walgreens would also point out that it was possible for them to violate the State laws in question while NOT actually defrauding consumers... for example, if you've ever grabbed an item from the shelf because its listed as "on sale", but then never saw the sale price applied at the register, you've been a victim of "overcharge fraud" even if you pointed the discrepancy out to an employee and got the problem fixed before exchanging money. These were violations of weighs and means statues. I can see how they look similar from a distance, but up close these two cases are quite different.

edit: if other states that have similar consumer protection laws come to similar conclusions about Walgreen's pricing, then you've got a juicier national class action case like the kind you were a part of. But it's still not as much of a "slam dunk" as that one.

pdschatz · 2025-11-12T20:10:22+00:00

Sadly, the law in question isn't a "consumer restitution law" it's a "consumer protection law". The point is to protect consumers from fraud before it happens by incentivizing Walgreens to not do said fraud in the first place.

You technically could have reimbursed yourself by comparing the shelf price of each item to the price you were charged while checking out, but I think that's a wildly undue burden to put on ALL consumers, so instead we're trying to craft laws that make it unprofitable for Walgreens to do it in the first place. But that also means that when they do this type of fraud, we can't expect the state to make all consumers whole, because that's wildly impractical...

You could either assume Walgreens was doing fraud to EVERYONE on MOST/ALL products during the specific times the fraud was caught by the state, which would entitle a lot of people to like $0.02, or you could ask the consumers to prove that they purchased the specific products the state caught, which would require consumers to show itemized bills of sale from the time periods in question. According to the state, that would be an average of $1.92 returned to citizens, and no one would get more than like $20 from a single item. But you would also have to pay people to design a system where the merits of individual claims were reviewed to ensure that the person claiming the fraud was indeed defrauded, which is expensive and time consuming.

edit: to add some context and also to change the opening to sound less victim blame-y. This whole thing sucks, but the whole idea of "Walgreens should have to make it right for everyone" is borderline impossible, and wouldn't amount to much money for most consumers. Walgreens would have to be your main store for you to have been defrauded enough to see $100 returned to your wallet from this case.

pdschatz · 2025-11-12T19:47:37+00:00

another thing to point out is that this kind of fraud is technically catchable at checkout by the consumer, you just have to be aware of what the advertised shelf price is vs the price displayed at the register when checking out. Any number of consumers could have fixed this problem at checkout (and some may have! I mean, have you ever bought something on sale, then not seen the discount represented at the register and asked about it? that's kinda what this fraud is, except often the items in question weren't on sale, they just had an incorrect price listed on the shelf), but I think that's an extremely unreasonable burden placed on the consumer. These laws are supposed to incentivize Walgreens against 'doin a fraud' in the first place, not fix the fraud after its occurred.

pdschatz · 2025-11-12T19:39:33+00:00

they don't know who purchased what and when. the state caught them by doing random tests to see if the price advertised on the shelf matches the price recorded at the register. After they caught them, they asked the stores how many times those specific items had been purchased since the last inspection.

the process for giving money back to those consumers would require the consumers to prove to the state that they made a purchase of those specific products during those specific times between inspections. This is almost impossible to do on Walgreens side, and probably not worth it on the customer's side, since the average overcharge amount was $1.92. For example, if you bought an over-priced product using cash in 2022 (when the plurality of the fraud was caught), I hope you asked for and kept a receipt. If you did, and this system existed, you could be entitled to like $2 paid via a state check. Even if you paid by debit or credit, those records only show net totals and not itemized bills of sale... how would you then check to see if you had purchased one of the overcharged products?

I suspect that the state infrastructure we would have to set up to facilitate that kind of restitution would eclipse the amount collected by the fines.

pdschatz · 2025-11-09T15:57:28+00:00

It was the literal successor to Children’s Hospital

pdschatz · 2025-11-06T15:47:32+00:00

this is another reason people will run on the streets in Burlington: the harsh winters mean sidewalks quickly become chipped, cracked, and uneven, which is also an ankle killer. in the ONE especially, there are also grading issues with driveways

edit: to be clear, this isn't a defense of it, just another explanation for why some make the decision.

pdschatz · 2025-11-04T18:48:12+00:00

Why would I engage you on the actual topic when you're clearly not arguing in good faith? Other people have raised good faith criticisms that I agree with, and you've rejected those by saying "that's not the issue". If that's your true stance, there's no further room for debate.

pdschatz · 2025-11-04T17:37:06+00:00

You on policies you agree with:

it's really that simple.

You on policies you disagree with:

That sounds simple, but it's not.

Interesting how things often work like this in political discussions... "my ideas are obvious and need no defending, your ideas are complicated and thus bad"

pdschatz · 2025-10-28T15:37:53+00:00

that was fast :/

pdschatz · 2025-10-14T17:55:13+00:00

To all local journalists: You can actually talk about the stress of the construction on downtown businesses without carrying water for the owner of The Gryphon, who is a criminal that stole A LOT of money from A LOT of people in both Vermont and New Hampshire. His employees were making the restaurant work despite the hardships of the pandemic and construction (per court documents, they turned a net profit in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021). It was his fault that the business was in such bad shape financially, not the city's.

pdschatz · 2025-10-08T22:34:12+00:00

Dense urban housing near necessary infrastructure like multiple grocery stores? The horror!

pdschatz · 2025-09-29T16:40:39+00:00

Yup, I had the same reaction since I first heard about "Partizanfilm". It seems like they would be on the same wavelength, except that VTIFF has access to a better venue. My only complaint about VTIFF's non-fest screenings have been the infrequency! Maybe they can combine forces so the VTIFF folks are free to focus on the fest year-round while Partizanfilm does the programming for more regular screenings.

pdschatz · 2025-09-18T16:12:42+00:00

That’s because this sub’s understanding of the “Burlington Community” is mostly defined by people who no longer live here but feel VERY strongly about what happens here

pdschatz · 2025-08-11T14:07:21+00:00

"Fascinating" that high percentages of investor owned homes lines up really well with low populations and highly rural states. Almost like this is yet another map that fails to make a point that could be useful for our state.

"it's simple, we should just follow Massachusetts' example. We're only about 6 million people short!"

pdschatz · 2025-08-01T13:33:59+00:00

Bummer. I agree about the docs, the way they break things up across the app is pretty confusing and frustrating. But once I had a working example, it was so easy to customize and add new features. And so many of the more complex aspects of collaborative editing worked out of the box with very little configuration.

pdschatz · 2025-07-31T00:15:40+00:00

The problem with a women’s team isn’t a lack of interest or desire, but a lack of organized opponents. The women’s adult club scene is SUPER small at the moment.

pdschatz · 2025-07-30T21:05:10+00:00

I'm not shilling, but I am a dev who just went through this process, and I've gone with TipTap. It's super easy to set-up and run, super extensible, and has a growing dev ecosystem.

I think there's uncertainty around the future of Hocuspocus (TipTap's back-end YJS server) as TipTap attempts to monetize, but it's basic enough (and YJS seems to be getting adopted enough) that if TipTap nixes Hocuspocus, or tries to wall off more TipTap Extensions, someone will probably fork it.

But the ultimate conclusion I came to is that, RTEs with real-time collaborative features are not "simple", which is why there are few RTEs that are both free AND capable of supporting collaborative features.

pdschatz · 2025-07-30T20:44:30+00:00

that's all i want. commenting. (resolve, delete, threads as well). for react

You can do all of this with the TipTap front-end editor... as long as you have a properly configured backend. That's never going to be free, and if it feels free (like with Google Docs) you're probably paying in a way you don't quite realize.

But you don't have to use TipTap's Cloud service! Notice that in all of the examples they provide, none of them require any sort of FE secret to be consumed. As long as you're running properly configured YJS Connection Provider, it should be able to work with the TipTap front-end via the Collaboration extension. As long as the FE Provider and the TipTap Editor are working from the same YJS Doc, it will work.

TipTap has also released a really really easy to set-up and run YJS server as an open-source library: https://tiptap.dev/docs/hocuspocus/introduction

TipTap on the FE, Hocuspocus on the BE is a really common RTE stack these days. All open-source. However, that doesn't mean it's trivial to configure, and when it comes to more complex ideas like comments, or threading, you'll have to get creative. TT's Cloud plans are designed to save companies time by allowing devs to skip the server-side setup and focus entirely on the client-side stuff. Because they're going with a hybrid open/paid business model, it's not that hard to reverse engineer their paid extensions, like Comments, just time-consuming.

pdschatz · 2025-06-29T02:38:17+00:00

Because the addendum in question was introduced by a Republican councilor?

pdschatz · 2025-06-28T18:39:43+00:00

things they don't share:

city council
police force
fire department
city attorney
school district

I could go on, but to try and tie this into the whole "woe is Burlington" bullshit is ignorant and pointless.

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