Remote City Council Meeting Interrupted By Pornographic Videos (mercurynews.com) 37
Friday's first-ever remote meeting for the Los Angeles City Council had to shut down for 20 minutes because of pranksters posting "pornographic videos".
The Los Angeles Daily News has the story: Council President Nury Martinez called a recess about an hour into the meeting, which is centered around a Los Angeles-centric relief package for workers, renters and homeless people during the public health crisis. She said there were "inappropriate videos" being posted. Soon afterward, city officials' voices could be heard discussing turning peoples' video capabilities off on the channel.
The reporter posted on Twitter that the meeting faced other challenges. "Councilman Joe Buscaino just yelled at his kids to be quiet." ("Maybe it's past Joe's bedtime," joked an assistant news editor.) The meeting ran on for nearly 11 hours, and by the end just six people remained in Zoom's meeting room.
"Seven people on the 15-member City Council voted to ban all evictions in Los Angeles, with 6 against. But that was not enough to pass the ban. They needed 8 votes."
The Los Angeles Daily News has the story: Council President Nury Martinez called a recess about an hour into the meeting, which is centered around a Los Angeles-centric relief package for workers, renters and homeless people during the public health crisis. She said there were "inappropriate videos" being posted. Soon afterward, city officials' voices could be heard discussing turning peoples' video capabilities off on the channel.
The reporter posted on Twitter that the meeting faced other challenges. "Councilman Joe Buscaino just yelled at his kids to be quiet." ("Maybe it's past Joe's bedtime," joked an assistant news editor.) The meeting ran on for nearly 11 hours, and by the end just six people remained in Zoom's meeting room.
"Seven people on the 15-member City Council voted to ban all evictions in Los Angeles, with 6 against. But that was not enough to pass the ban. They needed 8 votes."
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Re: Ok Cmdr Taco, stop posting your... (Score:2)
I do miss cmdr taco references.
Recused? (Score:3)
Majority? (Score:2)
So out of a team of 15 members, seven voted to ban all evictions, six voted against and two abstained or were absent. Shouldn't the majority be counted against people who voted, instead of against people who had the right to vote? If you can't be bothered to cast a vote, it should be removed from the total thus lowering the number of votes require
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That doesn't make sense. If I understood correctly, recusing yourself is exactly equivalent to voting against the measure (since it needs a majority to vote for it). So voting against the measure would be unethical due to a conflict of interest, but recusing yourself with exactly the same effect is somehow OK?
Re:Majority? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't the majority be counted against people who voted, instead of against people who had the right to vote?
That sounds good until you realize that it becomes easily possible to slip through whatever you want by keeping enough people away from voting. There's a reason that a lot assemblies have some kind of quorum rules put in place.
Evicting people is pointless if there's no one to take their place. The landlord isn't getting paid either way. If you let people stay at least they have a chance to pay back rent in the future at some point and the government can always let property owners use such late payments as a tax credit to ease their own financial burdens in turn. Put a solution in place so that there's no possible benefit to evicting someone while all of this is going on and you don't need to go around passing laws to try to prevent someone from doing something which might face legal challenge and get thrown out by a court.
It's 2020 (Score:2)
Re: It's 2020 (Score:1)
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It's pretty hard to fake video conferencing that has people you recognize, in real time. Until that is no longer true, their methods are reasonably secure from a voting perspective. There is little chance anyone will have their vote misconstrued or stolen. But that's just 15 people, and obviously asshats can still disrupt things. It TOTALLY doesn't scale, unfortunately.
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Indeed.
Secure fraud-free voting is easy.
Anonymous voting is easy.
It is combining the two that is difficult.
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These kind of ten second solutions that seem good on the surface but lack careful consideration of the problem are the reason th
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Besides, we already have a solution that has been tested time and again: mail-in ballots.
That's on purpose (Score:2)
I suspect if you looked into it the two that didn't vote were the most likely to lose their elections. By abstaining they can't be accused of voting against it, and abstaining is too complicated an idea for many voters to wrap their heads around. It muddies the waters, makes it hard to get a good sound bite.
This lets the council do what they want to (evict people during a pandemic
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Same goes for Congress, you can't pass a bill unless you have a majority of the elected, not a majority of those present.
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Shouldn't the majority be counted against people who voted, instead of against people who had the right to vote?
It depends how they've set up their procedural rules.
Re: It's really no different than Slashdot (Score:1)
Also, it did *not* actually harm anyone.
Sure, it was not nice to look at. But have you seen the teeth and hands and feet of some people in the summer?
People took a few seconds and moved on.
And that was not evem porn.Which is actually nice to look at.
I mean it's beside the point in a city council meeting, but so is yelling at your kids.
Just set some ground rules, and kick everyone who doesn't obey them, for a few minutes, growing exponentially every time.
Seriousy, who evicts people in times like these?? (Score:1)
Or fires them.
It's temporary! People will go back to normal right afterwards! What's wrong with you?
Such people are not only psychopaths, but morons too. The, harm everyone, even including themselves. They should be banished from society.
People who also need money. (Score:3)
Not all landlords are filthy rich. Some of them depend on that rent income, and if they go without it for too long, they are financially destroyed. They can't always afford NOT to evict tenants that don't pay, even if things will "eventually" go back to normal, since they lose precious time that they could have spent finding new tenants that will actually pay. When landlords can't pay the mortgage, the banks foreclose and the tenants get booted anyway!
Same goes for all employers. Some have sufficient ca
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I completely agree. This behavior, often driven by short-sighted greed (at least in the larger players) makes the crisis much worse and harms everybody.
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.... " (at least in the larger players)"...
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Not all landlords (or employers) are filthy rich. Many of them have less money than their tenants. It is common for empty-nesters to rent out spare rooms, or even move to a smaller house or apartment and rent out the house where they raised their families for retirement income.
If they have a tenant who is already in arrears and isn't even paying enough to cover utilities, then an eviction may be justified.
Landlords already have a big incentive to keep good tenants and many are deferring rent payments.
Ther
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Thats really simple. The owner has a home they on and has a loans on second, third, fourth investments a bank still needs payments on. As investments they had to pay for over time using rent money.
That one renting home is the only one they own during the time of wuflu.
The banks take all other homes for reasons. The renters are out of work. The owners cant pay the bank for homes with less rent per month.
It all worked as it did for d
Look for the helpers (Score:2)
Images are just a start, spam and malware are next (Score:3)
This is going to get a lot worse until Zoom provides better security.
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Basically, Zoom is meeting in public because they can't control who enters. We need a protocol that uses encryption to avoid uninvited guests.
Re: Images are just a start, spam and malware are (Score:1)
Just a recap (Score:4, Funny)
11-hour group masturbation video interrupted by porn video.
Host rights and responsibilities (Score:1)
Let the city council pay the rent (Score:2)
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Excellent. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.