Less than a month after New York Attorney General Letitia James said she would be willing to seize former Republican President Donald Trump’s assets if he is unable to pay the $464 million required by last month’s judgment in his civil fraud case, Trump’s lawyers disclosed in court filings Monday that he had failed to secure a bond for the amount.
In the nearly 5,000-page filing, lawyers for Trump said it has proven a “practical impossibility” for Trump to secure a bond from any financial institutions in the state, as “about 30 surety companies” have refused to accept assets including real estate as collateral and have demanded cash and other liquid assets instead.
To get the institutions to agree to cover that $464 million judgment if Trump loses his appeal and fails to pay the state, he would have to pledge more than $550 million as collateral—“a sum he simply does not have,” reportedThe New York Times, despite his frequent boasting of his wealth and business prowess.
I wouldn’t normally put this much stock in his assets actually getting flipped, but…
Someone or some company signed me up for Trump fundraising emails recently. The subject line of one from 2(?) days ago read: HANDS OFF TRUMP TOWER, so it sounds like they’re preparing some kind of mobilization/campaign to play the victim now that their options are quickly drying up.
“about 30 surety companies” have refused to accept assets
well yeah they’re lending him money to pay off a court judgment against him for lying about what those assets are worth. I wouldn’t lend someone money if their collateral was worth anywhere from 10%-1000% of what I lent them and there was no way for me to verify either. Besides, you know if he owes you money it’s gonna be years and millions before you can recoup anything at all.
Not really. The only interesting thing to come out of this is who will buy him out. Because someone will, that’s a president on the table for 500 million bucks.
A FORMER President, or what we also call a private citizen. If you’re thinking that you’re buying a President with a 500 mil bond, then you’re betting on him winning against the guy he lost against last time, which feels like as good a bet as taking Trump’s claims of what his properties are worth at face value.
I don’t have a half of a billion dollars but I’m watching the Vegas line and I might put a couple grand down on Trump winning. I’m not American. I don’t get a vote…but I’ll make some money off it if I can.
I think he’s going to win. Americans have shown themselves to be not very smart and you’ve got places like Michigan claiming they’re not going to vote for Biden because they think Trump is going to… Well They are stupid but they represent America.
This is such a stupid comment. You don’t even live here!
The polls show him leading, so do the pundits. He’s going to win for the same reason he did last time, you people are too ignorant to understand that he appeals to a huge swath of the country.
Your American exceptionalism is failing your society and you’re too blind to see it. Pride and greed. It’s wild to see.
Wait, how in the world could this have been a 5000-page filing? Is the entire text of War and Peace included 3 times in an appendix?
The point is to make the case difficult and time consuming, hoping to cause a delay. One common method I have seen is to print every email in an email chain. The efficient way would be to print the last email in a 30 reply long chain and have it make up about 5 pages of the filing. Instead of doing that though, you can print every email in the chain and turn it in to 50+ pages pretty easily. Trump does not want this case to be handled efficiently and having a 5000+ lage filing, full of repeated and unnecessary information is one way to make that happen.
Lol 5000 pages thrown at the likes of a cutting edge LLM is like a plank length of reading.
Glad technology is crushing that dumb loophole.
Edit: Lol people downvoting this are a good 6 months behind AI news.
You cannot rely on a LLM to summarise accuratly
Plus, that’s not a good task for an llm because its context window would almost certainly be too short.
It would “hallucinate” because it could only “remember” a fraction of the content and then everyone would be all pissy because they used the program wrong.
I mean you can pretty simply just engineer around that. Dumping 5k pages is obviously an idiotic way of approaching the issue. But having an LLM going through 500 words at a time, with 125 words of overlap in each sequence to pull out key words, phrases, and intentions, then put that into a structured data form like a JSON. Then parse the JSONs to pick up on regions where specific sets of phrases and words occur. Give those sections in part or entirely to the LLM again; again have it give you structured output. Further parse and repeat. Do all of these actions several times to get a probability distribution of each assumption around what is being said or is intended. Build the results into a Bayes net, or however you like, to get at the most likely summaries of what the document is saying. These results can then be manually reviewed. If you are touchy, you can even adjust the sensitivity to pick up on much more nuanced reads of the text.
Like, if the limit of your imagination is throwing spaghetti against a wall, obviously your results are going to turn out like shit. But with a bit of hand holding, some structure and engineering, LLM’s can be made to substantially outperform their (average) human counter parts. They do already. Use them in a more probabilistic way to create distributions around the assumptions they make, and you can set up a system which will vastly outperform what an individual human can do.
LLMs are still pretty limited, but I would agree with you that if there was a single task at which they can excel, it’s translating and summarizing. They also have much bigger contexts than 500 words. I think ChatGPT has a 32k token context which is certainly enough to summarize entire chapters at a time.
You’d definitely need to review the result by hand, but AI could suggest certain key things to look for.
LLMs are still pretty limited,
People were doing this somewhat effectively with garbage Markov chains and it was ‘ok’. There is research going on right now doing precisely what I described. I know because I wrote a demo for the researcher whose team wanted to do this, and we’re not even using fine tuned LLMs. You can overcome much of the issues around ‘hallucinations’ by just repeating the same thing several times to get to a probability. There are teams funded in the hundreds of millions to build the engineering around these things. Wrap calls in enough engineering and get the bumper rails into place and the current generation of LLM’s are completely capable of what I described.
This current generation of AI revolution is just getting started. We’re in the ‘deep blue’ phase where people are shocked that an AI can even do the thing as good or better than humans. We’ll be at alpha-go in a few years, and we simply won’t recognize the world we live in. In a decade, it will be the AI as the authority and people will be questioning allowing humans to do certain things.
(just asked up the thread:)
GPT-4 & Claude 3 Opus have made little summarization oopsies for me this past week. You’d trust ‘em in such a high profile case?
if you end them 100 times over the same text?
You cannot rely on a LLM to summarise accuratly
You can’t rely on people to summarize it accurately either. Humans make mistakes too. The difference is that I can ask an LLM to do the summarizing 10x, and calculate a statistical probability of a given statement being present or true in the text, at a very low cost. Just because LLM’s aren’t 100% reliable doesn’t make humans the best bar to rely upon either.
I’ll believe it when it happens.
Last time he had one lined up but up until the last second said it was impossible. Likely to maximize donations from his rubes.
Re: Donations, I saw this today. So it may not be that easy (ha!!).
Behind Trump’s campaign cash crunch: Small-dollar donor fatigue, major donor hesitation
KEY POINTS
- Former President Donald Trump is facing two major fundraising problems: a shortage of big money interest and a drop in small-dollar donor support.
- The decline in small-dollar contributors could be a significant obstacle, as the former president seeks to cobble together a 2024 war chest.
- Small-dollar donors are critical to Trump’s ability to raise enough money to fund his presidential campaign.
(Letitia James, wearing her pearls and flipping her hair) “You best believe it.”
Why do you feel the need to turn her into a racial stereotype?
Not a racial stereotype. If you ever watch her press conferences you’d know that’s the way she is. A smart hard ass prosecutor who has no problem taking on Trump or the NRA. I’d hate to be in her cross hair.
Well, you could insist your racism is ok, because reasons…
If you were being honest you could easily provide one of those many videos you claim exist.
You could accuse whoever you like of being racist,
But you could also stop being a troll
Weird how often when I block an account, it usually doesn’t take long for an account with very few comments to come along wanting to continue the arguement…
I’m confused? Is there a stereotype that all black women wear pearls and flip their hair when they talk? If you told me that was a stereotype of any race I would actually guess white but I kind of thought that was just something that women with a certain personality did, regardless of race.
It sounds like you read their comment and visualized something racist in your own mind. Maybe the call is coming from inside the house?
By all means, you can provide a link of her actually acting/talking like that too.
That other account sure as shit doesn’t want to.
But most people could find a better use of their time than defending racism online, you do you tho I guess…
I don’t know much about her and I don’t watch her press conferences. I’m not defending anyone, your comment has just genuinely confused me because I’ve never heard of this stereotype in my 33 years on earth, living in a racist state in a racist country.
I’m just asking how a hair flip and pearls is racist? Can you explain that?
Pearls. Hair-flip. Sass.
Well, it doesn’t have what every kept saying it would have.
But thanks for being the only one to actually link a video.
Just take the loss, damn. Who doubles down like this when they’re proven wrong!?
Who doubles down like this when they’re proven wrong!?
If someone provided the video of her acting like that, I didn’t see it because at some point I’ve blocked them.
You can link one for other people, if you can actually manage to find it. But I’m not going to see any of your comments anymore either.
If you are interested you can go and find one, it’s not going to be difficult. We are not here to bring you stuff. What a level of entitlement, sir (or ma’am).
Tell me you don’t know fuck about shit wiithout telling me you don’t know fuck about shit.
Why would he need to raise the money? He told the court he had $500M in liquid assets.
Could it be that he was being untruthful in his statement to the court? I think there is a word for that.
He testified to $400M, and he already put up a $100M bond for the other thing. But the whole point of this is that he overvalues things, right? I bet when his people had to get down to the actual state of the accounts and not what DJT feels they are, it was probably only $200M or so that is liquid.
It’s not worth going after him again for overstating that in court. It’s too easy to skirt around. His punishment will come when the DA starts seizing and auctioning stuff to pay the judgement.
Maybe he was talking in terms of Zimbabwe dollars
Fat fucker has no clue Zimbabwe is a thing.
Best he can do is Man, Woman, Boat, Plane.
…i thought his was person, woman, man, camera, TV?..
Yeah, you’re right, you should be president I guess.
…ow; i walked right into that one!..
I suspect that trump life is over if he fails to win in November, he will either take it himself or it will be effectively over bc he will be in jail and penny less. To that end he does not care about consequences of some extra crimes in the near term.
He’s a serial narcissist. Maybe one of the worst in the current world.
No way does he take his own life. That would require having empathy, which he absolutely does not have.
No. trump won’t take his own life. He’s not committed to any cause like someone like Hitler, nor does he feel backed into a corner.
What he’ll do instead is pander/cater to his unhinged base and con them out of what little money they have left.
That’s all after he pillages the coffers of the RNC for what he can use there to pay for his legal fees/woes.
It’s possible, and I don’t want to hope for too much here, but it’s possible, that trump maybe legit takes down most of the RNC/republicans if he fails to win in November.
If he wins though, I think we’re all pretty fucked. He’ll use tax money to pay for that judgement or some shit. He has no morals, ethics, or shame.
He’ll use tax money to pay for that judgement or some shit.
Can’t do that. President doesn’t control the purse, both revenues and budget come from Congress. He’d have to get Congress to include paying his legal fees in the budget and manage to pass that budget. Then he could pay for the judgement with tax money.
You know that whole “fiscal cliff” thing that keeps happening? That’s a consequence of this - Congress assigns a maximum amount of debt that the President can issue bonds until it is reached to pay for things in the budget (issuing bonds is technically a power of Congress, but they delegate it up to a set value via legislation so that they don’t have to bother). Congress also assigns how much money will be spent on each thing (aka the budget). When the President is required to spend more by the budget than there is in tax revenue plus bonds he is allowed to issue, that’s the fiscal cliff. It’s literally a problem that Congress creates (by creating a budget that spends more than is available in taxes and bonds), that only Congress can fix (typically by raising the amount the President can issue in bonds), but that usually gets blamed on the President.
That’s good to know, thank you for the detailed explanation.
I’m still concerned he’ll do it, and his sycophant supporters will enable him and let him do it because they see this as him being politically persecuted. You’re probably right, but if trump wins, nothing is normal, there is no rule of law.
Can’t do that. President doesn’t control the purse
And we’ll see how well that statement holds up when it runs up against a candidate who’s already been impeached twice, is overleveraged and compromised from foreign assets, who’s ON RECORD HAVING SAID HE’D BE A DICTATOR WITH ALL THE POWERS OF A DICTATOR FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS HE WAS IN OFFICE IN HIS SECOND TERM.
That’s how dictatorships start, they ask for the powers for just a few, just a little bit, and then it never gets returned.
So I have low confidence that anything we consider rule of law today will be in effect if trump should win a second term, with all the insane support he’s got within the GOP right now that currently controls the lower house.
