The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.
EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019
Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions
But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties (I say “and-a-half” because our centre-right is a semipermanent coalition of two parties, one representing rural/regional conservatives, the other more urban in its support base). But third parties and independents are a real political force in our parliament, and sometimes even determine the outcome of national elections
This is largely due to (1) we use what Americans call instant-runoff in our federal House of Representatives, and a variation on single-transferable vote in our federal Senate; (2) the parliamentary system-in which the executive is indirectly elected by the legislature-means the choice of executive is less of a simplistic binary, and coalition negotiations involving third party/independent legislators in the lower house can be decisive in determining that outcome in close elections; (3) twelve senators per a state, six elected at a time in an ordinary election, gives more opportunities for minor parties to get into our Senate - of course, 12 senators per a state is feasible when you only have six states (plus four more to represent our two self-governing territories), with 50 states it would produce 600 Senators
Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)
Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
I realise it may be somewhat beside your point, but that was a Kennedy+liberals vs conservatives ruling in 2015 - so the current SCOTUS would likely have ruled the other way, and decent odds they overrule it sooner or later. Scalia’s dissent was objecting to the entire idea of disparate impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, so more likely that gets overruled than this specific application of that idea.
This was a statutory interpretation case though, so if SCOTUS overturns the decision, Congress could reverse that with ordinary legislation, no constitutional amendment required. But who knows whether that will turn out to be politically feasible.
Does Apple use macOS in servers in its datacentres? Or are they all Linux?
Surely at a minimum they need macOS for CI.
Apple does have one advantage here-they can legally grant themselves permission to run macOS internally on non-Apple hardware, and I don’t believe doing so legally obliges them to extend the same allowance to their customers.
But that might give them a reason to keep x86_64 alive for internal use, since that platform (still) gives you more options for server-class hardware than ARM does
They do run Apple Silicon in data centers, so perhaps another custom version of Darwin + their system frameworks. It is hard to tell without some leaks :)
For Private Cloud Compute: “a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface.” https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
> Well, there is evidence that this company made and distributed CSAM
I think one big issue with this statement – "CSAM" lacks a precise legal definition; the precise legal term(s) vary from country to country, with differing definitions. While sexual imagery of real minors is highly illegal everywhere, there's a whole lot of other material – textual stories, drawings, animation, AI-generated images of nonexistent minors – which can be extremely criminal on one side of an international border, de facto legal on the other.
And I'm not actually sure what the legal definition is in France; the relevant article of the French Penal Code 227-23 [0] seems superficially similar to the legal definition of "child pornography" in the United States (post-Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition), and so some–but (maybe) not all–of the "CSAM" Grok is accused of generating wouldn't actually fall under it. (But of course, I don't know how French courts interpret it, so maybe what it means in practice is something broader than my reading of the text suggests.)
And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law, in spite of the fact that CSAM laws in much of the rest of the world are much broader than in the US. That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has. And, as I said – while that's undoubtedly true in general, I'm unsure to what extent it is actually true for France in particular.
It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics. The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
> It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics.
The most common French word is Pédopornographie. But my impression is the definition of that word under French law is possibly narrower than some definitions of the English acronym “CSAM”. Canadian law is much broader, and so what’s legally pédopornographie (English “child pornogaphy”) in Canada may be much closer to broad “CSAM” definitions
> The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
Which French law are you alleging they violated? Article 227-23 du Code pénal, or something else? And how exactly are you claiming they violated it?
Note the French authorities at this time are not accusing them of violating the law. An investigation is simply a concern or suspicion of a legal violation, not a formal accusation; one possible outcome of an investigation is a formal accusation, another is the conclusion that they (at least technically) didn’t violate the law after all. I don’t think the French legal process has reached a conclusion either way yet.
One relevant case is the unpublished Court of Cassation decision 06-86.763 dated 12 septembre 2007 [0] which upheld a conviction of child pornography for importing and distributing the anime film “Twin Angels - le retour des bêtes célestes - Vol. 3". [0] However, the somewhat odd situation is that it appears that film is catalogued by the French national library, [1] although I don’t know if a catalogue entry definitively proves they possess the item. Also, art. 227-23 distinguishes between material depicting under 15s (illegal to even possess) and material depicting under 18s (only illegal to possess if one has intent to distribute); this prosecution appears to be have been brought under the latter category only-even though the individual was depicted as being under 15-suggesting this anime might not be illegal to possess in France if one has no intent to distribute it.
But this is the point - one needs to look at the details of exactly what the law says and how exactly the authorities apply it, rather than vague assertions of criminality which might not actually be true.
> And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law
True, but outright child porn is illegal everywhere (as you said) and the borderline legal stuff is something most of your audience is quite happy to have removed. I cannot imagine you are going to get a lot of complaints if you remove AI generated sexual images of minors, for example so it seems reasonable to play it safe.
> That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has.
This is also common, but it is irritating too as it means the rest of the world is stuck with silly American attitudes about things like nudity and alcohol - for example Youtube videos blurring out bits of Greek statues because they are scared of being demonetised. These are things people take kids to see in museums!
To me, the most worrying part of the whole discussion is that your comment is pretty much the most "daring", if you can call it that, attempt to question if there even is a crime. Everyone else is worried about raids (which are normal whenever there is an ongoing investigation, unfortunate as it may be to the one being investigated). And no one dares to say, that, uh, perhaps making pictures on GPU should not be considered a crime in the same sense as human-trafficking or production of weapons are... Oh, wait. The latter is legal, right.
> Of course storage mediums are always going to use sector sizes of powers of two.
Actually, that's not true.
As far as I know, IBM floppy disks always used power-of-2 sizes. The first read-write IBM floppy drives to ship to customers were part of the IBM 3740 Data Entry System (released 1973), designed as a replacement for punched cards. IBM's standard punched card format stored 80 bytes per a card, although some of their systems used a 96 byte format instead. 128 byte sectors was enough to fit either, plus some room for expansion. In their original use case, files were stored with one record/line/card per a disk sector.
However, unlike floppies, (most) IBM mainframe hard disks didn't use power-of-2 sectors. Instead, they supported variable sector sizes ("CKD" format) – when you created a file, it would be assigned one or more hard disk tracks, which then would be formatted with whatever sector size you wanted. In early systems, it was common to use 80 byte sectors, so you could store one punched card per a sector. You could even use variable length sectors, so successive sectors on the same track could be of different sizes.
There was a limit on how many bytes you could fit in a track - for an IBM 3390 mainframe hard disk (released 1989), the maximum track size is 56,664 bytes – not a power of two.
IBM mainframes historically used physical hard disks with special firmware that supported all these unusual features. Nowadays, however, they use industry standard SSDs and hard disks, with power of two sector sizes, but running special software on the SAN which makes it look like a busload of those legacy physical hard disks to the mainframe. And newer mainframe applications use a type of file (VSAM) which uses power-of-two sector sizes (512 bytes through 32KB, but 4KB is most common). So weird sector sizes is really only a thing for legacy apps (BSAM, BDAM, BPAM-sans-PDSE), and certain core system files which are stuck on that format due to backward compatibility requirements. But go back to the 1960s/1970s, non-power-of-2 sector sizes were totally mainstream on IBM mainframe hard disks.
And in that environment, 1000 bytes rather than 1024 bytes makes complete sense. However, file sizes were commonly given in allocation units of tracks/cylinders instead of bytes.
It is right in claiming that "3.5-inch" floppies are actually 90 mm.
It is wrong in claiming that the earlier "5.25-inch" floppies weren't metric
"5.25-inch" floppies are actually 130 mm as standardised in ECMA-78 [0]
"8-inch" floppies are actually 200 mm as standardised in ECMA-69 [1]
Actually there's a few different ECMA standards for 130 and 200 mm floppies – the physical dimensions are the same, but using different recording mechanisms (FM vs MFM–those of a certain age may remember MFM as "double density", and those even older may remember FM as "single density"), and single-sided versus double-sided.
The system in Iowa, is instead of getting title insurance from a private insurer (as is standard in the US), you get it from a state government agency (Iowa Title Guaranty) which has a legal monopoly on all title insurance in the state. But people in Iowa say they don't have "title insurance", because the term is defined to mean private insurance, not the insurance issued by the state government. A condition of the state-issued title insurance is you need to provide an attorney's legal opinion that there are no issues with the title, and then the insurance covers the risk the attorney did a bad job, or failed to notice some obscure issue or hidden issue. But this is different from a true Torrens title system, in that title registration is not (near-)conclusive evidence of legal title, only de facto presumptive.
A number of US states historically had Torrens title, but most have repealed it, effectively converting Torrens titles to non-Torrens. Illinois had it – only in Cook County – until it was repealed in 1992. California abolished it in 1955. Virginia abolished it in 2019. Washington state abolished it in 2022-2023.
The big advantage of Torrens title is that it eliminates the need for title insurance, or at least makes it much cheaper. (You can still buy title insurance in Australia, but the Torrens title system significantly reduces the risk to the insurer, resulting in lower premiums–the risk it is covering is not that you don't have title to the property at all, rather risks such as the boundary fences being in the wrong places.) But in those US states which had it, title insurers wouldn't give you any discount for having it, and banks would still insist on title insurance to lend, nullifying the primary practical advantage of the Torrens system–the end result was your property was under a different title system which many didn't understand, which could make real estate transactions appear more complex, discourage buyers and lenders, etc. This resulted in political pressure from landowners on the system to be allowed to move off it, which is what resulted in it being repealed.
I think the US state in which Torrens would be most likely to be successful would be Iowa, since private title insurance is banned there. However, repeated attempts to introduce Torrens in Iowa failed, because the attorneys who investigate the validity of titles saw it as a threat to their livelihoods, and they successfully lobbied the state legislature against the idea.
No, the county clerk records aren’t a “single source of truth”. In the US system, it is possible to convince a court the county records are wrong, and order them overridden-which makes them not the single source of truth.
By contrast, in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final. If you are the innocent victim of a mistake by the government (or a fraud against it), the government has to compensate you; but you don’t actually get the land back if it has since been sold to an innocent purchaser.
> in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final
First, it doesn't seem like that's always the case, based on another post upthread talking about a land ownership case that went to the high court because of an error in the government's records.
Second, since there is no single government for the entire world, any government trying to implement a Torrens system is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain, which affect ownership of property in its jurisdiction. So there cannot be a "single source of truth" in the sense you appear to be using the term, even in the Torrens system.
> is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain
Excuse my German ignorance, but my understanding of how it works here is that unless the transfer is notarized, logged and recorded with the local authority, there has not been a legal transfer. So, by that definition of land ownership, no "events outside of its jurisdiction" can take place. Any such agreements become binding only upon their verified registration. A notary is responsible not only for confirming the transfer but also as independent consultant so neither party gets seriously ripped off. (And if they didn't, they would be in serious liability trouble.)
The "share of the database" is managed and owned by the local government, but its records are available all across Germany for authorities to look up. The vector database of lots is public, and there are procedures to request access to ownership documents for various purposes. The procedure is that when you want to buy a certain property, the owner confirms that you have permission to get the official record directly from the land registry, which then become the basis for any serious negotiations as what is recorded there is in fact the single source of truth.
In the three states where I've been involved in or observed real estate transactions, the system is similar in that a real estate transaction must be recorded with the county clerk to become effective. Generally documents are notarized to validate the identity of the signatories, and a notary is expected to confirm that the signatories understand what they are signing.
However, afaik, county clerks do not validate deeds; they will dutifully record any submitted deed if it follows the proper forms. If there is doubt about the validity of a conveyance, the whole history of recorded deeds for a property can be examined and potentially set aside if found to be fraudulent. Adverse possession laws can moot disputes about old conveyances though: after some time, someone who has "color of title", actual possession, and pays property taxes will gain actual title to the property, even if their original deed was deficient.
In a land registry system, the keeper of the registry generally validates that conveyances are approved by the current owner; this doesn't happen in a system of registered deeds. Deeds I've seen don't truly identify the grantors or grantees either. Typically just the first and last names. There are many people with my name, but if you have a deed for my house signed by the Pulitzer Prize winning author who shares my name, you can record it even though it's not actually valid.
Yes, it does sound like typical German bureaucracy to make events like death outside the jurisdiction impossible unless the deceased has obtained prior approval to kick the bucket. :)
Well, I do enjoy the layers of protection implemented here. It sounds like you wouldn't?
The record from the land registry includes things like wayrights for third parties, known ground contaminations, utilities/water/power lines etc. -- all very relevant to me as a potential buyer. I did enjoy the notaries explanations of various aspects, which went beyond reading the contract out loud and making sure we verbally understood what we were going to sign. The process also forces both parties to have written copies of everything prior to the final meeting, which provides another chance to let it sink in and potentially reconsider -- which in our case, we did. Also, they're really trained to verify IDs, not like a random clerk in some liquor store.
I understand one can experience it as "bureaucracy" and "annoyance" in their individual case, but then I wonder how much such people consider the bigger picture and what the benefit of all of it really is, for their own and for societies sake, and what kind of shitshow it would turn into if we got rid of all the "bureaucracy" -- such as described in the very blogpost here.
Even if I (wrongly?) assume I am always on top of things and I will not get ripped off ever, only so-called stupid people will, I really don't need more angry people who fell for scams or made quick decisions that they regret or whose identity got 'stolen' around me/on public streets/in bars. If it was for me, we could add even more such layers of protection, which you seem to see only as "(unnecessary) bureaucracy"?
> First, it doesn't seem like that's always the case, based on another post upthread talking about a land ownership case that went to the high court because of an error in the government's records.
I don’t know what High Court case they are talking about-they didn’t give a citation just a vague recollection-they might be remembering wrong.
But the assumption in the Torrens system is the government database is correct. There are rare exceptions-e.g. the so-called “paramount interests”-but they are narrow and very much exceptional. By contrast, in the US system, a court is totally open to entertaining the argument the county title records are incorrect, in many states there is no presumption against such an argument, and you aren’t required to convince the court some narrowly drawn exception applies before it will consider the argument. (Actually Australia still has something like the “US system” too-we call it “old title”-but old title is extremely rare. Anyone trying to sell an old title lot is going to convert it to Torrens before selling it. I don’t think you can legally sell it until you do so. So in practice the only old title lots left are those which haven’t changed ownership-other than by inheritance-in many decades.)
> Second, since there is no single government for the entire world, any government trying to implement a Torrens system is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain, which affect ownership of property in its jurisdiction.
That’s not how it works. Overseas contracts, court judgements, etc - if you don’t lodge them with the land title registry, they don’t legally exist as far as land titles go.
> if you don’t lodge them with the land title registry, they don’t legally exist as far as land titles go.
As I pointed out in another post downthread, that is also the case in US jurisdictions that record deeds: if the deed transferring ownership isn't recorded with the county clerk, the transfer doesn't legally exist.
The difference, at least in many US jurisdictions, as I pointed out in that other post, is that in those US jurisdictions the county clerk does not guarantee that the deed is final, any other legal challenges notwithstanding. For example, I think someone else upthread gave the example of someone making a will in a different state that left property to their children instead of their spouse. When that person dies, yes, whoever is supposed to inherit the property would need to record a transfer deed in the county where the property is located to effect the transfer. But their legal right to do so depends on a will executed in a different state.
In many US jurisdictions, the county clerk is not responsible for checking to see if the person recording the transfer deed has the legal right to do so; that's up to other parties involved. But under the Torrens system you describe, it seems like the government land registry would have to do such a check in order to make the guarantee it makes. But how can it? It doesn't control or have access to things like wills in other jurisdictions that determine who has the legal right to take title to a property.
> In many US jurisdictions, the county clerk is not responsible for checking to see if the person recording the transfer deed has the legal right to do so; that's up to other parties involved. But under the Torrens system you describe, it seems like the government land registry would have to do such a check in order to make the guarantee it makes. But how can it? It doesn't control or have access to things like wills in other jurisdictions that determine who has the legal right to take title to a property.
Commonly what happens-in legally complex situations, they’ll refuse to register the change in ownership; and then you have to challenge their refusal in the local jurisdiction’s courts-which are much better equipped to deal with complex legal issues, especially those involving interactions with foreign jurisdictions than the lands title registry is-and if you convince the court, they’ll order the registry to register the title change.
For deceased estates, they want to see an order from probate court telling them what to do before they do anything (if there is a will which nobody disputes, such an order is basically a formality). They don’t accept overseas court decisions; you need to apply to a local court asking for an order for the execution of the foreign judgement, and if the local court grants it, then the land registry will action it.
In your scenario where someone dies in another state, the legal process in Australia is-you apply to the probate division of the Supreme Court of their state of residence for an order of probate. Then you apply to the probate division of the Supreme Court of the state in which the property is located to get an in-state court order endorsing the out-of-state court order as valid. Then you send both court orders to the land title registry, and it will register the change of title in accordance with them. All the land title registry has to do is (a) validate the court order is real (I think they have access to court computer systems to double-check this); (b) in the (very rare) case there is any vagueness or ambiguity in what the court order tells them to do, they’ll reject it and tell you to get another court order with more precise instructions.
In the Torrens system, if you do not register the transfer of property with the government, then the transfer hasn't happened. So whatever else happens in the rest of the world doesn't matter (at least, unless the land itself is annexed by another government).
(And, from similar cases in the UK which has this system, if the land registry fucks up the transfer is still final and this has been upheld by the court, the government may just be liable for damages)
> In the Torrens system, if you do not register the transfer of property with the government, then the transfer hasn't happened.
This is also true of county clerks in the US: any transfer of property in the county has to be recorded on a deed that is submitted to the county clerk and kept on file by them. Otherwise it hasn't happened.
> if the land registry fucks up the transfer is still final
This is the part that might not be the same in all US jurisdictions (though it appears it is the same in some, someone posted upthread about Iowa having a system like this).
> This is the part that might not be the same in all US jurisdictions (though it appears it is the same in some, someone posted upthread about Iowa having a system like this).
As I pointed out in a reply to that comment, that's a popular misconception – legally, Iowa uses essentially the same land title system as every other US state; the main difference is instead of private title insurance, there is a state government monopoly on title insurance. But Iowans use the phrase "title insurance" to mean "private title insurance", making many of them wrongly think their state doesn't have title insurance at all.
Several US states previously enacted Torrens title, but largely unsuccessfully – few titles were ever converted to Torrens, and in almost all of them Torrens title is either repealed or effectively moribund.
The only place under US jurisdiction where Torrens title is fully mainstream, is Guam. Guam adopted it in the early 20th century, around the same time as the US territories of Hawaii and the Philippines did. It survived in the Philippines, but the Philippines became an independent country. In Hawaii, it was successful in a few parts of the state (in particular Lānaʻi), but otherwise largely not.
> any transfer of property in the county has to be recorded on a deed that is submitted to the county clerk and kept on file by them. Otherwise it hasn't happened.
No, the point is that this is actually not true. The transfer has happened as soon as the deed has been executed. There are many reasons you generally want to record the deed in a timely fashion, but doing so is not strictly necessary.
It is in Florida, which is where I live. Florida Statutes section 695.01:
"No conveyance, transfer, or mortgage of real property, or of any interest therein, nor any lease for a term of 1 year or longer, shall be good and effectual in law or equity against creditors or subsequent purchasers for a valuable consideration and without notice, unless the same be recorded according to law"
I can't say whether every US state has similar law in place, but I suspect most of them do, since both the State and the county clerks get revenue from the recording fees.
I would characterize that as a patching of some of the problems that arise from the system, not a changing of the system's underlying semantics.
By my lay reading of that, it doesn't even actually necessitate recording the deed sooner for it to have those effects - rather it just means that the deed needs to have been recorded some time before you get to court.
"Recorded according to law" refers to separate Florida statutes that specify how that's done--with the county clerk in the county where the property is located.
> it just means that the deed needs to have been recorded some time before you get to court.
No, before whatever event happens that might trigger a lawsuit.
For example (hypothetical as far as I know): say I purchase a property from a fraudulent seller. They promise me they'll record the deed after it's signed and notarized by both of us, but they never do so. (Of course I'd be stupid to do things this way, but maybe I'm a real cheapskate and want to save on title company fees.) Then they sell it to someone else. In order for my ownership rights to be protected by Florida law, I would have had to see that the deed was not recorded, and do it myself (and pay the recording fee), before the date of the second sale. Before the date of the court hearing to challenge the second sale would not be sufficient.
It's true that, in a typical closing in Florida (and in every other state where I've bought real property), the closing takes place at the title company's office, their notary notarizes all the documents and gives me copies before I leave, and I get the key to the house at the end of that. I don't have to wait until the deed is recorded with the county to take possession.
My question would be, how does a closing work in jurisdictions that have Torrens title? Does the closing have to take place at the land registry, so they can confirm that everything is checked and valid and recorded before I get the key to the house?
> before whatever event happens that might trigger a lawsuit
I'll accept that interpretation. But that's still just a patch over the underlying semantics trying to eliminate a lot of thorny cases, not a full change in semantics.
For example, let's say 12/31 is a Sunday. The seller wishes to sell the property this year for tax purposes. The seller executes the purchase agreement and the deed on 12/31, and then only records the deed on 1/2 (when the registry reopens). For purpose of taxes, that is still treated as a sale in the earlier year, right?
> My question would be, how does a closing work in jurisdictions that have Torrens title? Does the closing have to take place at the land registry, so they can confirm that everything is checked and valid and recorded before I get the key to the house?
I have no idea. It seems like the main difference with Torrens title is that when the deed is accepted by the registry then you know it is authoritative. So a closing at an attorney's office with delayed recording has the same ambiguity under both systems. The difference would be that when the deed is confirmed recorded under Torrens, that ambiguity has been fully resolved. Whereas under non-Torrens that ambiguity hangs around indefinitely, insured against by title insurance, and eventually [mostly] extinguished by adverse possession.
> For purpose of taxes, that is still treated as a sale in the earlier year, right?
To the best of my knowledge, yes, the date of closing, which is the date on which the deed is executed, is the date of sale for tax purposes. Note, however, that at least in the US, the IRS doesn't check what you claim the date of sale is unless you are audited, and I never have been. What would happen in an audit under your hypothetical, I can't say.
> a closing at an attorney's office with delayed recording has the same ambiguity under both systems.
Yes, that's why I asked if such a closing is even allowed under a Torrens system--it seems like it would defeat a key purpose of the system, which is to make sure that the land registry's records always are the "single source of truth" for who owns what.
I've actually personally dealt with a state's tax authority for a situation where the transfer date was significant, and it was never questioned.
> which is to make sure that the land registry's records always are the "single source of truth" for who owns what.
I think you're coming at this from a tech perspective of fully authoritative digital databases a little too much. Look at the ambiguity that remains after a non-Torrens transfer, and after a Torrens transfer. Eliminating that is the main point of Torrens title. It still can't solve the entire problem and be a "single source of truth" the way we see things in the tech world.
That Florida statute would seem to eliminate a good chunk of that ambiguity as well, but not all.
The IRS is Federal, not state. State tax codes are generally much easier to comprehend. But to describe the US Federal tax code as Byzantine would be to give too much credit for obfuscation to the Byzantines. :-) That's why it's so hard to predict what the IRS would do in the case of an audit (and why there is a thriving industry of tax preparers who claim, with varying degrees of justification, to be able to help you navigate the system).
That's a weird tangential rant. There is a difference between tax codes and general principles of accounting. I feel pretty confident that if a state tax authority agrees with the deed date being the transfer date, then the IRS would as well.
Also no, state tax codes can be pretty complex as well. On this particular issue, I had trouble finding an attorney who would represent me for less than $10k (while still equivocating about the merits of my position!), so I represented myself. It took a twenty minute phone call with two state tax agents to come to an amicable agreement. A++ would get taxed again.
I've previously been one to echo negative sentiment about government bureaucracy, but the times I've had to deal with it (not the IRS thankfully but rather a few other federal agencies) the agents have been generally helpful and empowered to act authoritatively. They're still part of a bureaucracy of course, with some of the laughable things that entails, but ultimately still human beings with some leeway to act.
For the most part I think the negative narrative has been informed by corporate bureaucracies getting really bad (IVRs, offshoring, bottomless ticket systems, now LLMs, etc) and so we're all assuming that the government simply must be worse. But it's not. (well maybe it is now after the DOGE arsonists brought so-called "corporate efficiency", I don't actually know)
I'm not sure what those have to do with this question, since it's a legal question, not an accounting question.
> I feel pretty confident that if a state tax authority agrees with the deed date being the transfer date, then the IRS would as well.
In many cases a state tax authority wouldn't even be involved, since many states don't tax capital gains (which is what would be involved with a home sale) while the US Federal government does.
> negative sentiment about government bureaucracy
Evidently your experiences with government bureaucracies have been very, very different from mine.
This turned very argumentative very fast. I had thought we were having an amicable discussion about the semantics of real estate titles.
I mentioned my experience with a state tax authority because it is direct personal experience about this very topic. I don't know why you turned that into being about the IRS, and are now even seemingly rejecting the state tax authority "being involved". The date of the transfer was directly relevant to my disagreement with the state tax authority, and they didn't question that date being the deed date even though the recording happened some time later. Either believe me or not, I don't care.
> Evidently your experiences with government bureaucracies have been very, very different from mine.
Sure? I'm not saying they were a some pleasant, responsive, quick, and casual experience - rather much less bad than I was expecting. And dealing with some corporate bureaucracies has been much worse, with constant transferring and calling back every week to check on status and make sure a ticket didn't get stuck and timeout, etc.
> I don't know why you turned that into being about the IRS
Um, because that's what I orginally began talking about when the topic of taxes came up? Go back and look at the first post of mine in this subthread where I explicitly mentioned the IRS. You brought up state tax authorities after that, not before.
> and are now even seemingly rejecting the state tax authority "being involved".
If you sell a home in a state that doesn't tax capital gains--such as the state I live in, and indeed every state in which i have sold a home--then the state tax authority is not involved. Which is what I already explicitly said.
> Sure?
Quite sure. I never assumed your experience was "pleasant, responsive, quick and casual"--indeed, your "much less bad than I was expecting" was how I already had read your previous post. And that experience is, as I said, very, very different from experiences I have had with government bureaucracies (not all such experiences, but enough of them that they are not outliers), for which the most charitable description I could give would be "much, much worse than I was expecting".
> dealing with some corporate bureaucracies has been much worse
I certainly have had bad experiences with corporate bureaucracies as well, and I was in no way implying that they are any better than government bureaucracies. My average experience with both is probably about the same.
FWIW even in the US system the courts usually won't order someone off land they are living on or using even if this were the case. At worst they would order compensation be paid - which is what title insurance actually covers.
Many states have a statute of limitations anyway. If you live on the land and pay the property taxes for N years everything else becomes irrelevant. Either the title was transferred to you or you squatted on abandoned land for N years: in both cases it becomes yours.
It's also entirely possible for a judge to just change the records because they don't like them. It's pretty common in Texas to see deed restrictions removed if the local government doesn't want them on there for example.
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
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