elitts

1.5 billion (no LC payment) / 5,000 = $300,000 1.5 billion (no LC payment) / 10,000 = $150,000 Of course, it's entirely possible when they meant "equitable compensation" they were talking about "making sure everyone with a claim got something" rather than "making sure every victim gets enough to feel satisfied (for lack of a better term)". As opposed to "the first few hundred victims who file court cases get settlements and everyone else gets nothing".

Hell, my shop classes were all in middle school. The only pieces of equipment we absolutely weren't allowed to use were the table saw and the power miter saw. Even the band saw could be used, but only if the cut you needed to make allowed you to keep your hands 6" away from the blade and under the teacher's direct observation. The belt sander, jointer, planer, palm sander, drill press and lathe were all fair game. Though the lathe was only allowed for 8th graders and only with special dispensation from the teacher. I didn't understand why then, though I do now after seeing videos of lathe accidents involving hair, loose clothing and improperly held tools.

I mean, I get it lit fine. I just get frustrated because by the time the whole stack of briquettes is going good, the ones at the bottom are half burned up. so then I have half size briquettes that make it harder to keep a constant specific temperature in an oven. Yeah, I am starting to have a burning hatred of the new two foot tall "fire rings" with the 6" thick concrete sides that are worthless for doing basically anything except standing next to and warming your hands.

I think that's pretty standard with any mass-tort type situation. Those with the most best cases and best documentation (therefore the most likely to win in an independent suit) end up subsidizing the people with the worst cases and less comprehensive documentation. But even for open states I don't think it's as clear cut as some folks do. If you have a strong case against an LC with relatively few cases, you are probably getting hosed by any nationwide deal, but if you are in an open state with a LC facing hundreds or thousands of claims, you wouldn't be in a much better scenario than with the national settlement. This is one of those issues that a number of people seem to really be hung up on. I understand being frustrated that what you thought they meant by "equitable compensation" isn't what's going to be happening here, but it's not like the BSA wrote that with the intention of misleading people. When this all started, they thought 5k-10k was the upper limit of potential victims. That would have meant a 150k-300k payment on average.

Hmm.. I've been known to say "Ok guys, this is not the way to do this, so cover your eyes" when I'm using lighter fluid with the charcoal chimney. I probably need to look up tips on getting all the coals hot at the same time. Fortunately, the scouts aren't supposed to use liquid accelerants anyway.

Because in Gagaball you aren't allowed to throw the ball, only hit it while bent over, which means the amount of force that can be exerted is severely limited. Plus, the space is limited, which means the chance for the ball to arc up high enough to hit above the waist is low. In 10 years of Cubs and Scouts, every injury I've ever seen in Gagaball is either from someone just getting jostled and falling down, or someone trying to jump/climb out of the pit and falling over the wall. (or banging their hand into the ground or wall trying to hit the ball)

Just to be a little nit-picky. "Non-profit" is not the same as "a valid 501c3 organization". I am the sole member of a Non-Profit LLC in my state that exists for the purpose of "owning" a set of canoes for youth group use. But since there's no money coming in or going out, I haven't bothered obtaining the 501c3 designation from the IRS. So, all 501c3s are non-profit, but not all non-profits are 501c3s. You could theoretically have a non-profit chartering a troop that simply filed taxes as a non-exempt entity.

Boy, I'm not sure why you want to set people's teeth on edge before you offer input, but you sure do a good job at it. It's not the way I'd try and persuade folks, but I'll assume you have a reason. I put my scouts at risk at pretty much every camp-out, it's called "adventure". Last campout they went trail (bike) riding and we had 2 kids take headers off their bikes when they hit stuff. One kid got what I assume was a really really mild concussion cause he went headfirst into a tree (a little dizzy for 3-4 seconds), the other got a long shallow scrape down his wrist. They also used hatches and an axe, threw tomahawks, were moving stuff into and out of the fire (foil dinners). All of these are approved Scouting activities. So we aren't talking about "keeping kids safe" when the program revolves around inherently unsafe activities, we are talking about "what level of being unsafe is acceptable". My big issue is that the occasional, objectively stupid, rules/reasoning in the G2SS shakes confidence in the document as a whole. It's kind of like if I came across a (medical) Doctor who happened to be a Flat Earther. They might be giving me entirely reasonable medical advice, but as soon as I know they think the Earth is Flat, everything else they say is getting filtered through the feeling of "Yeah, but this guy's an idiot who thinks the world is flat". So when the BSA tells me that "safety" requires restricting 6-7 year olds from being allowed to use a hand-held paint brush to "help" on their older sibling's Eagle Project, I start wondering what kind of nutjob came up with the safety standards. It doesn't cause me to ignore the rest of the rules, but it makes me wonder "what else in here doesn't make sense?".

Yep. Even when the logging companies only take 1 tree out of 4, (which is generally a low percentage) they never mention the collateral damage that the remaining woodlands will take from the machinery they are going to bring in. I mean, some timbering can be helpful for the forest, but if they really wanted to be "conservation minded" they'd contract with the low impact loggers like the Amish/Mennonites or require logs to be skidded out in singletons with a log arch rather than allowing them to bulldoze roads to get the massive skidsteers and log trucks back in.

Or worse yet... Hey! Record me!

If there is a Council officially advertising that as a rule, I bet they aren't actually implementing it since it effectively eliminates the ability to have OA or Council contingents to HA bases or Summer Camps. I hope it's just yet another instance of some Council Commissioner or DE misunderstanding a rule and giving bad explanations. (Like the Commissioner I heard telling a group at a Roundtable that if you must have 2 different bathrooms available any time there are females along. Even if the bathroom in question is a single person, individually locking stall)

I understand how it should happen. But if you don't work in the field, you'd be absolutely amazed at how often people make incredibly stupid and uninformed decisions when it comes to buying property. (like a local developer that bought a 30 acre tract without realizing that the Seller's father had granted all development rights to the state for another 45 years) That includes people buying multi-million dollar properties without surveys, inspections, lawyers, or even checking with the local municipality to see if there are outstanding issues. The single biggest saving grace for most people is that if you want a mortgage on a property, you are going to have an underwriter insisting on title insurance who will insist on checking everything out. But if there's no mortgage involved, all bets are off on whether all the documents are fully completed or filed correctly.

I meant I'm uncertain on the suitability of the offer. I knew what the amount was.

I'm uncertain on the (suitability of the) amount of the offer. I suspect it's too low. My feeling on numbers like that in situations like this is that if one party quickly agrees, they're probably getting a deal. But I also think the fact that the settlement is pulling in funds from LCs that face little to no risk is a significantly balancing factor.

Having worked with non-profits for a while I know that generally speaking they frequently do a very poor job of actually tracking purchase agreements, endowment restrictions and even just segregating restricted and open funds. Plus the level of specificity required on property transfers (to be upheld in the courts) has changed over the years. So where today if you were going to do a restricted property transfer you'd file a Covenant Deed for the transfer and maybe even a separate Deed Restriction in order to enforce your wishes, 50+ years ago the intention to donate land solely for the purpose of a camp may only have been included on a purchase agreement, or might just be mentioned on a line or two within the deed. Or it may have just been an oral agreement at the time the land was conveyed. It doesn't make those restrictions less binding, just harder to prove. And of course, as you've noted, restrictions are only as binding as the remaining donor families want to make them. If no one tries to enforce a deed restriction, it's basically worthless. Personally, I agree that they ideally they shouldn't have been included. But it becomes murky given the insurance situation since BSA was carrying policies intended to cover everyone. I don't know enough about insurance to know if that was an insurmountable problem or not though.

However, without the qualifier "Available", that statement isn't very useful. Regardless of what many folks would like to believe, many of those assets are restricted (certainly not all of them though). And even where they aren't restricted, they often wouldn't end up on the table in anything but a liquidation. Quite frankly, even among those assets LCs have been selling, I suspect if you actually looked into the past you'd find out the properties were donated on the condition that they be used as scout camps but they've managed to skate by and get them sold without the families involved finding out to file court cases. I know it's happened around me at least once or twice. I think it was Owasippe where they had the whole sale written up in the back room and basically signed when someone popped up and said "Uh.. You can't sell that."

I haven't been to Summit, but if it's in the budget, make sure you do the New River rafting trip. I did that a couple years ago with my son and it's an absolute blast.

My pack always operated with the requirement that no child could attend any function without some adult taking personal responsibility for the scout. It didn't have to be that child's parent after Tigers, but there had to be someone. You couldn't just drop your kids at the door and drive away.

Nah. He gets basically zero credibility in my book. A fired/laid off person making lots of accusations and claims without any support or verifiable explanation isn't a reputable source. In particular, the claim that someone in the BSA or COs is deliberately letting known abusers continue to have access to kids seems wildly unlikely. Has it ever happened? I mean, clearly we already know the Catholic Church did this and they sponsored some troops, so of course it did. But if he was truly the beleaguered champion of youth that he's trying to portray, I'd have expected him to have either dealt with this already or have resigned in protest right before he forwarded all the data concerning it to the FBI. Plus, several of his statements make me wonder if he ever actually understood the point of Scouting. The only two things he mentioned that could be the basis of actual rule or policy changes to reduce risk to scouts were: Older supervision of younger scouts is a problem; Overnight trips may represent an unreasonable risk to scouts. That would be like the Safety Director for the NCAA opining that "sports involving direct contact between players is unreasonably risky".

Bzzzt!! Implement that rule and you can no longer maintain "All aspects of the program are open to observation by parents". Parents who are not register-able for reasons unrelated to child sexual abuse would therefore be unable to observe the program. Besides, that whole argument is a strawman. Have we got a problem with unregistered adults molesting kids on weekend trips? I haven't heard of one, the standard abuse case profile I've seen is that "a trusted official Scouter" is the abuser. So what problem are you attempting to solve? Is the problem adults in proximity to scouts on over-nights? What about other unrelated groups in the immediate area of the campout? There's bound to be some problem adults in say, a state park campground. Is the problem unregistered adults interacting with scouts at all? What do you do about every unregistered adult at the various facilities that scouts visit?

I don't mind beadings at a Court of Honor (or other youth events) as long as it's kept to a very brief 1-3 minutes, but often times the overzealous beador drags things out to 5-10 minutes with songs and all that jazz and it really isn't appropriate at a ceremony designed to celebrate youth accomplishments. I watched one (unwillingly) at a Scouting University that dragged on for nearly 15 minutes and you could tell that every scout and pretty much every non-WB adult was bored out of their minds. If you don't have a current troop, I wouldn't worry about waiting for a CoH. Beading ceremonies should be about celebrating the awardee, not advertising; and if it were me, the obligatory clapping of people I barely knew wouldn't mean very much.

That's where the wide open SoL laws are going to go. Regardless of the motivations of the lawyers in the BSA case, at some point, some of the law firms that see success in this case are going to get hungry again and they'll start targeting other programs with broad memberships. When they could only find a few plaintiffs at a time I'd imagine the financials on pursuing a case were problematic. But when you can go back through the entire life of the program, I have to think it starts looking more workable.

All of the comments regarding rules over un-paid advertising in threads has been moved as it was a fairly significant diversion from the purpose of this thread. Please take any further comments regarding it to that thread.

I get it. He's your champion. I'm not impugning him or his dedication and I wouldn't expect someone who views the TCC that way to feel otherwise about him being a member of a committee like that. But to be clear I wasn't talking about someone "being bitter" after a divorce or after serving on the TCC, I'm talking about the emotional and mental fatigue and damage one suffers while going through a "bitter divorce" or something like this bankruptcy. And "average survivor" in the context of my previous post simply means "one that hasn't spent 2 years winnowing through every document, pleading, brief or anything else to do with this case".

There's a big difference between the average survivor and one that has spent 2 years fighting an active battle against the BSA. Kind of like the difference between a divorced spouse and a divorced spouse that went through 2 years of bitter divorce proceedings.