In Washington state, the State Patrol has gone on the record multiple times and with the media saying their enforcement is based on "Under 10 over", i.e. they won't pull you over for doing 69 or less on the Interstate in a 60 zone, or 79 or less in a 70 (assuming speed is the only issue).
Interstate, no, and actual speed limit, no, but the one I always think of is this, on US 101, near Steamboat Island in Olympia where you come off a 60mph two lane state highway to an off-ramp that is 430' long and has an advisory 10mph speed for a very unforgiving 90/180 degree turn (160' diameter circle) - with the ability to rear-end people joining the highway if you miss the first part of the turn or the ability to t-bone people if you miss the second. ChatGPT describes the braking required as being at the high end of moderate, almost hard braking, for a sustained 9 seconds to slow sufficiently to make the turn, assuming you start braking the moment you are in the exit lane (and there's no advanced warning, just a single "10mph" yellow sign as you enter that lane): https://imgur.com/a/uns86kp
(I think) what you are thinking of was something introduced around the Catalina>Big Sur transition, when the Pro Display XDR was introduced.
At the time, people were "marveling" at the magic of Apple, and wondering how they did the math to make that display work within bandwidth constraints.
The simple answer was "by completely fucking with DP 1.4 DSC".
I had at the time a 2019 (cheesegrater) Mac Pro. I had two Asus 27" 4K HDR 144Hz monitors, that the Mac had no problems driving under Catalina.
Install Big Sur. Nope. With the monitors advertising DP 1.4, my options were SDR@95Hz, HDR@60Hz. I wasn't the only one, hundreds of people complaining, different monitors, cards, cables.
I could downgrade to Catalina: HDR@144Hz sprung back to life.
Hell, I could on the monitors tell them to advertise DP 1.2 support, which actually improved performance, and I think I got SDR@120Hz, HDR@95Hz (IIRC).
So you don't deserve downvotes on this. Apple absolutely ignored standards and broke functionality for third party screens just to get the Pro Display XDR (which, ironically, I own, although now it's being driven by an M2 Studio, versus the space heater that was the Xeon cheesegrater).
If you're Flock, and an officer ran a search against a Flock database, for a crime that was later solved, regardless of how it was solved, they will crow that "Flock solved a crime".
Nah, Matt Levine is an absolute Texas Two Step apologist, something that made me lose a lot of respect for him.
He repeatedly contorts himself into pretzels trying to defend it (why?) and into equal pretzels avoiding exploring the two elephants in the rule:
1. He (and those involved) claim that the process is "actually, truly, intended to be solely for the benefit of the plaintiffs suing us", and that defendants are doing them a favor, going out of their way to spin off these entities that are flimsy houses of cards.
2. Is it just a coincidence that of the firms who've gone through the Texas Two Step process, that they've managed to get away with not having to pay ninety per cent of court-ordered liabilities, and in at least one case, ninety-eight per cent?
Why on earth would these companies bend over backwards to do something that they claim has zero benefit for them, and is only truly intended to help streamline and optimize plaintiff's efforts in suing them?
Why is it even called the Texas Two Step? Is it because:
1. it assists claimants and plaintiffs (their adversaries) to bond together and present one solid unified case against you, or...
2. because it assists them to elegantly dance around their liabilities?
Levine and the firms and companies he's carrying water for insist the name has nothing to do with the second point.
In the JJ case, Levine's apologism of "they weren't bankrupt enough, yet" is horseshit.
JJCI was funded to the tune of $2B. Slightly less than the $61.5B of liability, you'll agree.
After the bankruptcy was rejected, the Judge had said that the bankruptcy might be necessary at some point in the future, but "now wasn't the time".
JJCI re-filed bankruptcy proceedings three hours later.
These don't add up anywhere close to $10b, let alone $61.5b.
$61.5b is the amount that J&J ultimately agreed to pay the new company (LTL) that it spun off to take over the liabilities.
This is from the court that rejected the bankruptcy:
"we cannot agree LTL was in financial distress when it filed its Chapter 11 petition. The value and quality of its assets, which include a roughly $61.5 billion payment right against J&J and New Consumer, make this holding untenable."
My translation: "This new company can get up to $61.5b from J&J but says it's in financial straits. Bankruptcy denied."
I'm aware the Texas Two Step is used by companies to get out of paying what they legally owe. It's unclear to me if this particular case is a good example of that today because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b and that's much more than the judgements against them.
If in 20 years all the judgements end up being more like $80b and J&J says "Whoopsie, money's run out" then I guess we can call shenanigans.
I don't know what Matt Levine has said about the Texas Two Step outside of this case.
> JJCI re-filed bankruptcy proceedings three hours later
What did they change in their application? What happened to the new filing?
> I'm aware the Texas Two Step is used by companies to get out of paying what they legally owe. It's unclear to me if this particular case is a good example of that today ...
They are using the same law firm (Jones Day) as the others. It's a perfectly good example.
> ... because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b and that's much more than the judgements against them.
Actually, the $2B and $8.9B proposals in LTL's two bankruptcy proceedings made the funding from J&J contingent on claimants and future claimants accepting the bankruptcy, i.e. its J&J effectively trying to shoehorn this into an informal class action - plaintiffs can choose to form a class action, defendants are not able to force them into one, but this effectively would. So it seems unlikely that J&J would ever be on the hook for $61.5B. Indeed, HoldCo, the parent of LTL, in turn owned by J&J would only ever be funded to a maximum of $30B.
> Here's a law firm's summary of all the judgments to date against J&J
to date. There's many many more (thirty-eight thousand) cases that have not been adjudicated, in fact.
> because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b
Where do you think that number came from? J&J playing good corporate samaritan, or knowing that they still have many, many more cases winding through the courts, or in discovery, than have had final judgments rendered so far?
Good for J&J. They've actually only paid $2B - of the $10B of judgments that you yourself acknowledge. Good for J&J. And they've committed to funding $61.5B? How's that worked out for other companies doing this?
Georgia Pacific, in the same spot, committed to an initial funding of their T2S entity, and to review this further as needed. In the end, they funded it to the tune of $175M. And then told the court that the entity was entirely independent from GP and they had no obligation to do any such thing.
St Gobain, in the same spot, committed to funding to the tune of $50B, and ended up putting in less than $100M and refusing anything further.
So audacious was St Gobain that they were laid into by the court:
> Gross testified that Saint-Gobain repeatedly misrepresented its intent in creating the subsidiary that eventually filed for bankruptcy, calling executives’ testimony and other statements “misleading” and “not truthful.” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Whitley followed Gross’s testimony last August with factual findings that included his own blistering critique of the executives’ statements as “contrary to the evidence,” saying the company’s story “strains credibility.”
Four major companies have tried the Texas Two Step lately. All of them have used the same one law firm, again, Jones Day. Three of them (J&J being the fourth) have managed to drastically under-deliver on their commitments and liabilities and have emerged unscathed as a result.
Trane Technologies, same thing.
Weird that LTL was formed in North Carolina, where this scheme seems to work, yet J&J has no corporate presence there (headquartered in NJ)
But somehow, J&J, and Matt Levine would love us to believe that this time, somehow, it'll be different.
> What did they change in their application?
They changed the number from $2B to $8B and filed bankruptcy again. It was again dismissed. The first time, the courts as you said described it as an untenable position. Now, they were more annoyed, saying that the application was made in actively bad faith.
"Johnson & Johnson would later make a third attempt at resolving talc litigation through bankruptcy in 2024, which also failed. The company continued to face thousands of lawsuits alleging its talc products were contaminated with asbestos and caused cancer.
The repeated bankruptcy dismissals established important precedent limiting the ability of financially healthy corporations to use the Texas Two-Step strategy to avoid mass tort litigation."
This is from another mesothelioma law firm (important to note that J&J has actually resolved many of the mesothelioma claims against it, ~95%. But the vast majority of claims are around asbestos, and have a much clearer causality, typically resulting in larger verdicts).
April 2025, J&J, sorry, LTL, have since tried, and failed, to file a fourth bankruptcy. They're getting increasingly nervous that they won't be able to sidestep liability.
There's also this hugely perverse incentive with all of these "commitment to fund"s:
"You injured me and have been ordered to compensate me. But in order to do so I have to hope you continue to prosper, potentially injuring others along the way, so I get my compensation. I can choose between getting you shut down, but potentially not being compensated, or being compensated but knowing that you go on to be able to do this to others."
Your post boils down to "funding commitments are worthless and unenforceable", which if true is
1. surprising to me, a layman. and
2. means it's just as well J&J's ploy didn't work.
All the rest about J&J using the same law firm etc. doesn't make for much of a smoking gun for me.
You're also right about the perverse incentives. But it would be equally unfair if the last 37k of those 38k plaintiffs didn't get any money because the first 1000 to win were awarded all of it.
Tl;dr J&J may or may not be playing fair. Is there another orderly process to ensure all plaintiffs are treated fairly?
Using the same law firm which has made a point of assisting companies through this process...
Of which it has represented four companies. The first three of whom, using Jones Day's playbook, have managed to escape with making payments that are a single digit percentage of what they actually have judgments for, have told the courts, through those same lawyers, "Yeah, we're not actually going to be held to those commitments" and have faced no further consequences, almost as if the lack of commitment was a part of the plan...
... and the fourth, J&J/LTL is trying the exact same thing, and every time they have been rebuffed, have tried and tried again, four times now.
Is it a good thing that this isn't working so far? It's a better thing, perhaps. But the plan of J&J and LTL is to keep pushing and hope it does work in the hope that, like Jones Day's other clients and playbook, they will be able to fold up, having paid a tiny fraction of their liabilities out, while J&J continues to make billions a year in profits.
Many, many attorneys, let alone judges/courts, are of the clear belief that this is exactly what J&J is attempting to do.
That they have not been successful thus far is not in any way deserving of credit towards J&J.
Yup. It's "weird" that all of these companies claim that "swear to god, we fully intend to honor our obligations", then all of them use this one law firm who specializes in doing exactly the opposite and "oops, look what happened, we have no more legal obligation, that belongs now to this other entity that we said we'd fund but ... somehow ... didn't. Or certainly not anywhere near where we said we would."
But there are definitely apologists and deniers of it, even right here on HN. Or "you don't know that's what's going to happen, we owe it to them to wait and see", even as you watch the exact same law firm guide another company through the exact same process in the exact same way, but somehow, maybe, this time, it'll have a different outcome.
You know that 99% of companies with revenues above say $1B do exactly this, just in the guise of often less noble causes?
Fun fact, Monster Cables owns no patents or IP (or effectively none), it just licenses them all from the "wholly independent, arms-length" Monster Cables Bermuda, Inc. entity.
In Seattle, the most ritualistic abusers of the HOV lanes are large SUVs and trucks with only a driver in them.
Also, ex-paramedic, three cases fairly similar, but the one I found most egregious, was us going lights and sirens on I-5 heading to Harborview, heavy heavy rain. Traffic on the freeway slowly but steadily goes right. Cue a single-occupant Escalade accelerate up, overtake us on the inside and pull into the HOV lane to take advantage of the cleared freeway in front of us.
For bonus irony points, licence plate holder: "Don't drive faster than your angels can fly", lady, you just overtook an ambulance in emergency mode.
We actually called that one in. Some satisfaction as we rolled by her a few minutes later, pulled over with a state trooper having lit her up, who points at us and shakes his head at her.
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