Originally, John Doe was a sham name used to indicate any plaintiff in an action of ejectment (a legal action to regain property) in civil court. Richard Roe was the counterpart, to indicate the defendant. These fake names were used in delicate legal matters, a practice that was abolished in English law in 1852. Since then, John Doe has been used to indicate any man of unknown name, with Jane Doe used for females.
Under the legal terminology of Ancient Rome, the names “Numerius Negidius” and “Aulus Agerius” were used in relation to hypothetical defendants and plaintiffs.
The name “John Doe” (or “John Do”), “Richard Roe”, along with “John Roe”, were regularly invoked in English legal instruments to satisfy technical requirements governing standing and jurisdiction, beginning perhaps as early as the reign of England’s King Edward III (1327–1377).[8] Though the rationale behind the choices of Doe and Roe is unknown, there are many suggested folk etymologies. Other fictitious names for a person involved in litigation in medieval English law were “John Noakes” (or “Nokes”) and “John-a-Stiles” (or “John Stiles”). The Oxford English Dictionary states that John Doe is “the name given to the fictitious lessee of the plaintiff, in the (now obsolete in the UK) mixed action of ejectment, the fictitious defendant being called Richard Roe”.
This usage is mocked in the 1834 English song “John Doe and Richard Roe”:
Two giants live in Britain’s land,
John Doe and Richard Roe,
Who always travel hand in hand,
John Doe and Richard Roe.
Their fee-faw-fum’s an ancient plan
To smell the purse of an Englishman,
And, ‘ecod, they’ll suck it all they can,
John Doe and Richard Roe …
This particular use became obsolete in the UK in 1852:
As is well known, the device of involving real people as notional lessees and ejectors was used to enable freeholders to sue the real ejectors. These were then replaced by the fictional characters John Doe and Richard Roe. Eventually the medieval remedies were (mostly) abolished by the Real Property Limitation Act of 1833; the fictional characters of John Doe and Richard Roe by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852; and the forms of action themselves by the Judicature Acts 1873–75.” Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs v Meier and others (2009).
In the UK, usage of “John Doe” survives mainly in the form of John Doe injunction or John Doe order (see above).
8.02 If an unknown person has possession of the confidential personal information and is threatening to disclose it, a ‘John Doe’ injunction may be sought against that person. The first time this form of injunction was used since 1852 in the United Kingdom was in 2005 when lawyers acting for JK Rowling and her publishers obtained an interim order against an unidentified person who had offered to sell chapters of a stolen copy of an unpublished Harry Potter novel to the media.
The first word that I learnt from this research – sartorialists – derived from the word Sartorial (adj) that of or relating to clothing or style or manner of dress.
Textured, solid, striped, botanical, jacquard, geometric, 52 to 58 inches long, alternately withering or widening from 3112 to 5 inches, costing anywhere from three for $10 to $100 or more.
Why has this apparently useless piece of silk, or wool, or rayon, or polyester or even rubber (yes, there are Rubber-Necker Ties, “a recycled fashion statement for the eco-executive”) survived the swings of fashion for more than three centuries? Why is it still fit to be tied?
Fashion observers say the necktie survives because it is the one formal accessory in the male wardrobe that expresses personality, mood or inner character. The tie is that splash of color, that distinctive pattern, that statement of individuality that a man can make in the world of uniform pinstripes and plaids.
The tie has been seen as a form of male chest display, recalling the chest-pounding and puffing of our prehistoric ancestors. Or it can be viewed as the noose around the neck of the conformist white-collar worker, or the symbolic leash held by women who purchased more than 50 percent of the 105 million ties sold in the United States last year. Although most American men do not wear ties daily, U.S. neckware sales totaled $1.6 billion last year, with 70 percent made by American companies.
The necktie originated in the 17th century, during the 30 year war in France. King Louis XIII hired Croatian mercenaries who wore a piece of cloth around their neck as part of their uniform. While these early neckties did serve a function (tying the top of their jackets that is), they also had quite a decorative effect – a look that King Louis was quite fond of. In fact, he liked it so much that he made these ties a mandatory accessory for Royal gatherings, and – to honor the Croatian soldiers – he gave this clothing piece the name “La Cravate” – the name for necktie in French to this day.
International Necktie Day is celebrated on October 18 in Croatia and in various cities around the world, including in Dublin, Tübingen, Como, Tokyo, Sydney and other town
The Evolution of Modern Necktie
The early cravats of the 17th century have little resemblance to today’s necktie, yet it was a style that stayed popular throughout Europe for over 200 years. The tie as we know it today did not emerge until the 1920s but since then has undergone many (often subtle) changes.
In the 2nd century A.D., Roman legionnaires probably didn’t think of themselves as reflecting a trend when they tied bands of cloth around their necks. Most likely, they were just looking for protection from the weather.
Some historians have called the legionnaires’ adornments the first neckwear. But others cite the excavation near the Chinese city of Xi’an of 3rd century B.C. terra-cotta statues of warriors who wore neck scarves in the belief that they were protecting the source of their strength, their Adam’s apples.
Most experts, however, date the initial appearance of the modern precursor of the tie to 1636. Croatian mercenaries, hired in Paris by King Louis XIV, wore cloth bands around their necks to ward off natural elements, which in their line of work included sword slashes.
Parisians quickly translated the Croats’ scarf into a new clothing accessory, and, voila!, the cravate was born. The French term cravate is derived from Croates, French for Croatian. Not to be outdone, the English adapted the cravat, dropping the final “e”, and the American colonies soon stepped in line.
Once launched, the cravat and its styles and knots proliferated. Early cravats looked like lace bibs with bows backing them up, some reaching two yards in length.
Among emerging varieties in the late 17th century was the Steinkirk, a corkscrew-like wrap, originating from the Battle of Steinkirk where startled French officers hastily twisted their ties as they fled their tents to turn back the British onslaught.
During the early 18th century and into the 19th century, cravats had major competition: the stock. While a cravat generally was a long piece of cloth that wound around the neck and tied in front, the stock resembled collars worn today for whiplash or other neck injuries.
Made of muslin, sometimes with cardboard stiffeners inside, stocks were fastened in back by a hook or knot. In front, they had what looked like a pretied bowtie or sometimes a wide cravat covering the stock and swathing the neck like a poultice. Stocks forced men to stand upright in a stiff posture.
American revolutionaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Adamses (John and John Quincy) can be seen in contemporary portraits by Gilbert Stuart and Charles Willson Peale, wearing swath-like cravats, although the American versions were less radical than those of their counterparts in France.
In the mid-1800s, the “solitaire” appeared — attached to the wig in the back, wrapped around the neck and brought to a bow in the front over a cravat.
Some other bizarre dress and tie styles emerged in the mid-18th century. In England, the so-called “Macaronis” were dandies affecting an Italian style, coloring their cheeks with rouge and wearing diamond-studded pumps and cravats with huge bows. The fashion may be alluded to in the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
An iconic snack synonymous with the movie theatre and entertainment, actually packs quite a pop as a healthy snack as well.
Archeologists have found traces of popcorn in 1,000-year-old Peruvian tombs. This week, we’ll take a look at the story behind this popular snack, and discover that there’s more beneath that hard husk than meets the eye.
It’s been said that popcorn was part of the first Thanksgiving feast, in Plymouth Colony in 1621. According to myth, Squanto himself taught the Pilgrims to raise and harvest corn, and pop the kernels for a delicious snack. Unfortunately, this story contains more hot air than a large bag of Jiffy Pop. While the early settlers at Plymouth did indeed grow corn, it was of the Northern Flint variety, with delicate kernels that are unsuitable for popping. No contemporary accounts reference eating or making popcorn in that area, and the first mention of popcorn at Thanksgiving doesn’t appear until a fictional work published in 1889, over 200 years later.
So if America didn’t first eat popcorn at Thanksgiving, when exactly did it happen? French explorers wrote of Iroquois popping tough corn kernels in pottery jars filled with heated sand. The Iroquois nation spread throughout the Great Lakes region, so it’s likely that settlers to upstate New York, Vermont and Quebec were the earliest European-American popcorn makers. By the mid-1800s, popcorn was beloved by families as a late-night snack in front of the fire, or at picnics and sociables. But mass consumption of the treat didn’t take off until the 1890s, after a Chicago entrepreneur named Charles Cretors built the first popcorn-popping machine. Cretors was a candy-store owner who purchased a commercially made peanut roaster so he could offer freshly roasted nuts at his shop. But he was unhappy with the quality of the machine, and began tinkering with it. A few years later, Cretors had designed entirely new machines, powered by steam, for both nut roasting and popcorn popping. The steam ensured all kernels would be heated evenly, for the maximum number of popped kernels, and it also enabled users to pop the corn directly in the desired seasonings. By 1900, Cretors introduced a horse-drawn popcorn wagon, and the era of the popcorn eaters began.
When popcorn was first sold inside movie theaters, almost 100 years ago, it actually helped buoy the business, which was flailing at the time as the country entered the Great Depression. Always an affordable treat, today, popcorn is tinged with nostalgia. For many Americans, the aroma alone triggers happy memories of going to the movies, of waiting in line to see a new release with friends and family.
Early American settlers adopted corn, including popcorn, and learned to grow and cultivate it, ensuring it stayed in the diet of hundreds of thousands of people for the next several centuries. In the mid-1800s, the steel plow—which could cut through tough vegetation—transformed Midwestern agriculture. In Nebraska, Iowa, and Indiana, corn—especially the poppable variety—became such an important cash crop that it was dubbed “prairie gold.” By 1917, the region had so deeply embraced this nickname that it inspired poetry: Members of the Iowa Press and Authors’ Club collaborated to produce Prairie Gold, a volume of poems and stories that celebrated the region’s corn production.
Early popcorn probably resembled parched corn, which is made by cooking dried kernels, often in a frying pan. (Because parched corn typically uses kernels with lower water content, curbing its ability to pop, it’s considered a predecessor of CornNuts.) “Parched corn is much crunchier,” Frank says. “We know that in the early Southwest, there was popcorn—it just wasn’t a Jiffy Pop that you’d put in your microwave.”
The fluffy popcorn we know and love today is, in part, the result of thousands of years of careful cultivation of a few different strains of corn by those early tribes. Modern processing techniques ensure its dramatic cooking process: Corn for popping is grown, cured on the stalk, picked, and then dried until each kernel contains around 14 percent moisture, according to the USDA. When exposed to heat, that moisture expands, causing the kernel to burst into the final product.
Of course, the majority of Americans now get their popcorn from a microwave, not a horse and buggy. The first patent for a microwave popcorn bag was issued to General Mills in 1981, and home popcorn consumption increased by tens of thousands of pounds in the years following. Today, Americans eat about a million pounds worth of (unpopped) popcorn a year.
Early American settlers adopted corn, including popcorn, and learned to grow and cultivate it, ensuring it stayed in the diet of hundreds of thousands of people for the next several centuries. In the mid-1800s, the steel plow—which could cut through tough vegetation—transformed Midwestern agriculture. In Nebraska, Iowa, and Indiana, corn—especially the poppable variety—became such an important cash crop that it was dubbed “prairie gold.” By 1917, the region had so deeply embraced this nickname that it inspired poetry: Members of the Iowa Press and Authors’ Club collaborated to produce Prairie Gold, a volume of poems and stories that celebrated the region’s corn production.
Popcorn has long been popped in pots over a flame, but the turn of the 19th century brought a flurry of popcorn innovation. In 1875, a Kentucky resident named Frederick J. Myers patented a corn-popping device that added a stay-cool handle. But popcorn’s real rise wouldn’t come until sellers could easily carry popping machines around with them. That happened in Chicago in 1885, when Charles Cretors invented a lightweight electric machine that popped corn in oil, allowing vendors to easily move along with crowds in search of a better profit. Eight years later, Cretors improved the model by adding a contraption that would butter and salt the popcorn, too. The first commercial popcorn brands also got their start around the same time, when Iowa’s Albert Dickinson Co., which sold kernels under the names Big Buster and Little Buster, came onto the scene in the 1880s.
Yesterday, Eddie Van Halen Passed after an unsuccessful fight with Cancer. He was 65. It’s 2020! enough said!
I was introduced to his music in 1996, by my brother, back in India. It was fitting that the first song I heard was Right Now.
After that I heard the entire string of hits including Jump & top of the world.
The introduction to “God Level” guitaring in Eruptions propelled him to the top of my book in terms of best guitarists and I actually introduced my 5 year old son to Van Halen to have him now almost daily say “Hey Google, Play van halens jump”.
In a fitting tribute, last night, when my son asked for “relaxing music” instead of Jazz by coltrane, he wanted Jump!
Rest in peace Eddie! Thank you for introducing me to Rock!
The used car market in America is estimated to be around $350B. With more used cars flowing in – the discerning buyer is spoilt for choice. Hertz is going to have to sell around 200,000 cars from its fleet as part of its bankruptcy proceedings. While the number of cars might not make up a significant amount ( in comparision CarMax sells 1.3M vehicles a year and Carvana sell around 100,000 cars); the price of these vehicles is what might move the market towards the lower end of the spectrum. Most rental cars ( with an exception of a few numbers) are the base trims or one above the base trim (Chevy LS/LT, Ford SE, Nissan S/SV, Toyota LE, etc)- so the entry level buyer will have more options. The average cost of the used car is around $15,000, thus with the latest announcement from Honda – the used car market might be the next growth sector.
Honda Motor Co. became the latest manufacturer to abandon subcompacts last month when it announced plans to discontinue its low-end Fit hatchback in the U.S. General Motors Co. has dropped the Chevrolet Sonic, and Toyota Motor Corp. said it will stop U.S. sales of its Yaris. All three of these vehicles’ base models carry sticker prices less than $20,000 — among the most affordable new cars.
Cheap entry-level vehicles once were a must for full-line carmakers, if for no other reason than to attract first-time buyers and consumers with low credit scores. The hope was they’d eventually trade up and stay loyal to the brand. But razor-thin profit margins on low-cost sedans no longer justify the investment and marketing costs to keep them at a time when many drivers are opting for sport-utility vehicles and trucks.
Dying Breed
The market share of new budget-friendly vehicles is waning. So budget-minded shoppers are forgoing that new-car smell for pre-owned wheels, which have long been a stepping stone for first-time and penny-pinching buyers. But ‘used’ doesn’t necessarily mean old, especially for recent models coming off short-term leases.
“The used car is almost becoming the entry-level vehicle for many consumers,” said Joe Vitale, lead global automotive analyst at consultant Deloitte. “Vehicles coming off of lease are quite desirable and have much of the new technology.”
The shift from small sedans to larger vehicles isn’t a new trend, but it has accelerated to the point that people looking for budget-priced models don’t have much of a choice these days. A generation ago, first-time car buyers could select from a number of products, ranging from the Dodge Colt to the Geo Metro. In recent years, the category has almost disappeared from the U.S., with GM canceling the Chevy Cruze, Ford Motor Co. ditching its Fiesta and Mazda Motor Corp. withdrawing the Mazda 2 model.
There still are a handful of smaller options on the market — such as the Nissan Motor Co. Kicks, Hyundai Motor Co. Accent and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV Jeep Compass — for drivers who eschew ample creature comforts and high levels of horsepower.
“As long as demand is still out there, it’s good to have a product that addresses those needs,” Randy Parker, head of Hyundai’s U.S. sales, said in an interview.
Even so, sales of new models under the $20,000 mark have been trending down for the past five years, dipping to just 1.3% of all new-car sales so far this year, based on Kelley Blue Book data. Deliveries in the $20,000-$30,000 range also have been dropping drastically, plummeting to 22% from 44%.
This means buyers are spending more for the privilege of driving out of a showroom. The average price paid for a new vehicle is close to $39,000, according to Kelley Blue Book data. That’s way above some buyers’ budgets, forcing them to look for heavily discounted new offerings or opt for used cars instead.
The pinch is coming at a time when more first-time buyers are shopping for cars, an unintended consequence of the coronavirus. The pandemic appears to be undoing a multiyear trend that saw younger people choosing public or shared transport over vehicle ownership. Analysts say the pendulum now is swinging back amid social-distancing orders and heightened fears of contagion.
“As they moved into cities, they viewed ownership as inconvenient and costly, but now we have young people who had never considered owning vehicles buying cars,” said Deloitte’s Vitale.
One positive development for buyers: more newly off-lease vehicles as some couples working from home give up a car, along with a flood of models from rapidly downsizing rental-company fleets. The growth in the past few decades of certified pre-owned programs with warranties and improvements in average quality also helps ease pressure to buy new.
“Younger people have always been attracted to used cars, and now they have better used cars to choose from,” said Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at car-shopping researcher Autotrader.
The Hyundai Sonata, introduced by Hyundai back in 1985, is currently on its 8th generation. It was introduced as a facelifted Hyundai Stellar, however, due to poor market response, it was yanked in less than 2 years. Over time, the Sonata became a powerful alternative to the popular Accord and Camry. Offering a well specd, yet cost effective alternative mid-sized daily driver.
While the Sonata has been around for a while, they have Hyundai has always tried to throw everything into it for it to stand out. One such technology is the Adaptive cruise control. Introduced around 2015, the Sonata became one of the early adopters of the Adaptive cruise control.
The Sonata Limited offered a whole host of features – leather, ACC, the panoramic sun roof and some versions actually came with Android Auto. This was the 7th generation or LF which stretched from 2014-2019. It was given a facelift in 2017
I personally liked the spacious and airy cabin. It provided a good amount of light and there was enough room to comfortably fit a 6′ 3″ 300lbs person.
Engine: The performance was nothing to write home about – the 2.4L I4 pushed out around 185bhp, which did move the 3000+lbs car efficiently, but like I mentioned earlier, nothing to write home about. IT however did give it a fairly decent MPG rating of about 36MPG. While the EPA has rated the engine at 28/38, real world conditions give the car an average of about 36. My 2014 camry gives me only 29 on an average, and even on long drives gives me about 30Mpg. My benchmark is my 2016 Passat S which actually gave me about 500 Miles on a tank of gas. I was might impressed with that trip, but the Passat ended up becoming my baseline for fuel efficiency for non-hybrid cars.
While the Hyundai’s have been around for a long time, brand value and recollection have them languishing with “perceived problems”. There was a recall issued for the sun-roof mechanism, while cosmetic, can, from experience, break while on the freeway causing a serious concern. Other than that, there have been a few issues reported with cold start noise- an issue attributed to the tensioner on the timing chain; certain issues with parking lights and a few other cosmetic issues.
The nice thing about the Sonata, being a Hyundai comes with a 10 year 100,000 mile drivetrain warranty (For the 1st owner) which, when passed onto the 2nd owner is 5 years and 60,000 miles. However, components are not very expensive and being a mass-market brand, volume helps bring component and labor prices down.
The model stayed pretty much the same with a few cosmetic changes in 2017. The biggest change was that android auto / car play became standard across all the trims. Which I think is a huge improvement, and a first in the market in its segment.
The next generation or the DN8, introduced in 2019 debuted as MY2020. The eighth generation Sonata uses a new third-generation architecture and showcases Hyundai’s latest “Sensuous Sportiness” design language which was first previewed by the Le Fil Rouge concept. The styling is less conservative and more pronounced compared to the previous generation. It now sports a fastback-like shape, and features driving lights which run all the way up the hood and full-width, C-shaped taillamps. The interior has been redesigned significantly as well, with an optional 12.3 inch digital cluster and 10.3 inch center screen
Standard features on every 2020 Sonata include Advanced Smart Cruise Control (ASCC), Forward Collision-Avoidance Assist, Automatic High Beam Assist, Lane Keep Assist System (LKAS), Lane Follow Assist, Driver Attention Warning, LED headlamps, LED daytime running lamps (DRL’s), LED tail lamps, and Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone integration. New features available for the first time on the Sonata include an NFC Digital Key, Remote Smart Parking Assist (RSPA), Around View Monitor (AVM), a 10.25-inch (10.25″) navigation infotainment system, a 12.3-inch (12.3″) LCD instrument cluster display, a Bose premium audio system, next-generation Hyundai Blue Link technology and a color heads-up display. Trim levels for the Sonata are SE, SEL, SEL Plus and Limited.
The safety system, which comprises three radar systems, five cameras and thirteen ultrasonic sensors, allows for driver-assist features such as standard adaptive cruise control, forward-collision braking and lane-following assist.
Overall, the Sonata, is an excellent value for money vehicle providing a reliable and feature rich mid sized sedan that is economical and affordable.
When more than 30% of your employees are debt collectors, you have to question – are you a lender or a collector. The following article came in Jalopnik – Read the original article here
When Don Foss started his career as a car salesman, he recognized early on that most of his prospective customers had shaky credit, leaving them with few options for financing to buy a vehicle. So in 1972, he started subprime auto lending company Credit Acceptance Corporation to fill that void. He knew lending money to buyers with low credit posed an inherent risk, and he knew the business couldn’t solely be focused on closing sales. It had to excel at collecting loan payments too.
Indeed, over time, the collections side of the business has transformed into a fundamental pillar of the Credit Acceptance model, sparking numerous government investigations and lawsuits over alleged deceptive practices, while exposing some of its customers to ceaseless debt.
But it’s even worse than many know. The extent of Credit Acceptance’s well-oiled debt collection machine is perhaps best illustrated in the company’s backyard: Detroit.
In 2017, one out of every eight civil lawsuits filed in Detroit’s 36th District Court, the largest district court in the state of Michigan, was a collection case brought by Credit Acceptance, according to an analysis of publicly available court records by Jalopnik. Credit Acceptance alone—a company meant to service subprime car loans under the cheerful motto of “We change lives!”—absolutely dominates the civil case volume of one of the country’s busiest courts.
The issue was raised in three reports by a legal transparency nonprofit group called PlainSite over the last year. PlainSite had the idea to scrape court records from Detroit’s 36th District court to obtain information about CAC. It also made its source code for analyzing the Detroit court records publicly available; Jalopnik independently verified and expanded on PlainSite’s methods by building our own software to scrape the records data, and conducting additional interviews.
Jalopnik’s analysis also raises the specter that Detroit’s court system, which teetered on insolvency just five years ago, is now staying financially afloat with help from the fees it collects in cases filed by Credit Acceptance’s debt collectors. The nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending, in a study earlier this year on debt collection suits clogging Oregon courts, pointed out that consumers there have to pay an appearance fee to the court before they can file a response to contest the debt, or other court fees.
“It costs to file a case in the first place, it costs to file a complaint, and then—as we found in Oregon—it costs a decent amount of money, a couple hundred dollars, to file a response,” said Lisa Stifler, deputy director of state policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. “It’s not all cases, but it’s money that, yes, if courts were funded by states more fully, then perhaps some of those fees wouldn’t need to be as high, because they have operating budgets that are covering some of those expenses. There’s some sense that court filing fees do end up paying for running the courts.”
Reached by phone, Foss deferred comment to Credit Acceptance. The lender didn’t respond to a request for an interview, and did not answer a list of detailed questions sent by Jalopnik.
In other words, the number of debt collection suits makes a bad situation in Detroit even worse. The loosely regulated auto lending market lets dealers arrange loans with exorbitantly high interest rates, financed by companies like Credit Acceptance.
High interest is associated with a higher chance of default, and if a low-income driver falls into default, loses their car to repossession, and then gets hit with a collections suit, they run the risk of Credit Acceptance garnishing up to 25 percent of whatever wages they’re earning, and possible insolvency. A study published in July found a borrower who loses their vehicle to repossession is twice as likely to file for bankruptcy.
“The real concern should be that borrowers who are unaware of the consequences of default/repossession are taken advantage of,” said Erik Mayer, a finance professor at Southern Methodist University and co-author of the study. “In some cases, lenders may know the borrower won’t be able to repay the loan in the end, but it may still be profitable to make the loan due to high interest rates, fees, and the ease with which they can repossess the car in the case of default.
By analyzing publicly available records from Detroit’s 36th District Court dating back to 1995, Jalopnik found:
Credit Acceptance filed at least 32,799 collection suits against 39,714 Detroit car buyers, more than 4 percent of all available civil cases.
In 2017, the company’s collection suits represented 12.18 percent of all 32,660 publicly available civil cases in Detroit, up from just 1.45 percent in 2007. (The court reports that it handled more than 43,000 civil cases last year, and says it’s “not responsible” for any omissions in the online 36th District Court Case Inquiry System. At that rate, Credit Acceptance still comprised over 9 percent—or nearly one in 10—of the court’s caseload last year).
Jalopnik counted a “case” as an action against one or more defendants; in some instances, two or more defendants are named in the same suit.
The company secured judgments against 6,556 defendants that were eventually paid off in full. 6,150 of these judgments were default judgments—meaning cases when the car buyer didn’t show up to defend themselves. Defendants sometimes didn’t show up in court because they weren’t even notified to appear, several consumers told Jalopnik. In those cases, Credit Acceptance garnished at least $27.5 million in wages and income-tax refunds.
Lawsuits against at least 33,158 Detroit car buyers remain pending. In those cases, Credit Acceptance has secured 22,802 default judgments worth at least $162.6 million. It’s unclear how much has been garnished and collected from those suits to date, but records show that 40 percent have been ongoing for at least 10 years, and at least 2,200 have been pending for more than 20 years.
The chart below represents Open Credit Acceptance Debt Collection cases (cases in which the defendant(s) has not yet satisfied the judgement(s) against them). The numbers on the left indicate how long the cases in that category have been open. The numbers at the bottom indicate how many defendants there are in all cases in a given category. The numbers atop each bar indicate how much money has been secured in judgements against all the defendants in all the cases in that category.
Each individual defendant is represented as a dot placed within the category that that defendant’s case belongs to. If you’re viewing this on a PC, hover your mouse over the dots to see the current status of Credit Acceptance’s case against this particular defendant.
It’s unclear exactly what led to the situation in Detroit, although the tough economic situation for the city and its residents in recent years has certainly contributed. The company has been investigated by regulators for potential wrongdoing, and it has faced accusations in cases across the U.S. of duping car buyers into taking on untenable loans, however no current probes in Michigan against Credit Acceptance appear to exist.
But what’s clear is that, in recent years, Credit Acceptance has sharply increased the number of debt collection cases it has filed in the Motor City—and in a state where its practices have been called into question before. Credit Acceptance’s main debt-collection attorney was indicted in 2005 for falsifying hundreds of court documents, claiming he’d notified consumers to appear in court when he hadn’t.
Credit Acceptance had also been accused in the past by a suburban Detroit court of providing insufficient documentation to support its requests to garnish borrowers’ wages. The court’s clerk had discovered reams of errors in its filings, but when Credit Acceptance sued the court for subjecting its garnishment requests to more scrutiny, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with the lender, leaving courts barely any leeway to substantively review the accuracy of its filings.
“With the Michigan Supreme Court case, it makes it very easy for them to do this,” Stifler said. “It’s like a lawsuit mill. They don’t need to make sure they have the paperwork in order or be absolutely sure that what they say is owed is actually owed. They have pretty free rein to file what they want.”
The company has long portrayed itself as a do-gooder, a lender of last resort for consumers who otherwise had no other options. But consumer advocates characterized Jalopnik’s findings about Detroit as alarming, and say it calls into question whether Credit Acceptance is even providing its customers with a sound loan product.
The figure “is pretty striking in terms of numbers,” Stifler said. “If you’re not putting out an affordable product, or if you’re putting out a predatory product and/or not looking at whether people can actually repay it,” she went on, “the fact that high collection lawsuits is not all that surprising.”
“It’s entirely structured to be about collection,” said Missouri attorney Bernard Brown, who has waged legal battles against Credit Acceptance since the 1990s. “That’s fundamental to their model.”
Drew Millitello didn’t start out his bankruptcy law career by filing cases on behalf of consumers who went broke. After graduating law school in 2009, with the economy in tatters, he initially worked on behalf of creditors looking to recoup whatever they could from bankrupt companies.
“Which is the opposite side of what I do now,” he said.
A few years on, the caseload from representing clients of auto lenders and the county treasurer’s office took a toll.
“When you’re sitting behind a desk and you’re signing motions you don’t really see the first-hand accounts of it,” Millitello said. “But when you are in front of the judge… that’s when you begin to see the human aspect of it.”
“That’s what drew me back to the other side,” he said. Millitello linked up with a few friends from high school and launched a consumer debtor bankruptcy firm called Detroit Lawyers, PLLC.
Shortly thereafter, the firm put up a brief blog post about Credit Acceptance for consumers who’d faced a repossession, a garnishment, or simply dealt with a high interest car loan for a vehicle that broke down. Immediately, Millitello said, potential clients started reaching out.
“It drives a lot of our clients into bankruptcy,” Millitello said of Credit Acceptance collection cases. Today, at least 25 percent of the firm’s active garnishment cases deal with Credit Acceptance, he said.
“Their whole business model is based on this,” he said.
Don Foss (middle), founder of Credit Acceptance, accepts award from National Alliance of Buy Here Pay Here Dealers
A number of Millitello’s case files, provided to Jalopnik, offer insight into the characteristics of loans consumers who wind up in bankruptcy.
There’s a 2001 Ford Expedition, financed with a total $11,000 loan just last year, at 22.99 percent. A 2005 Mercury went to a Detroit resident with a $16,000 loan carrying a 24.99 percent interest rate. A 2009 Ford Escape went to another resident, also for a $16,000 loan at an interest rate of 23.99 percent.
(Keep in mind those numbers reflect the total cost of the loan including Credit Acceptance’s finance charges, not the base price for the car itself, which speaks to how egregious these financing offers can be.)
One example from court documents of a Credit Acceptance loan.
Low-credit buyers have few options to turn, and that’s why they’re stuck with loans that carry sky-high interest rates. If they fall behind, and their car gets repossessed, the effect can bury them, especially if Credit Acceptance takes them to court, Millitello said.
“When you’re being garnished the debt puts you in the corner,” he said. “They have families to support. Twenty-five percent of their wages, they cannot survive.”
Denita Anderson knows how hard it can be. The 24-year-old bought a 2005 Chevy Impala last year with a loan from Credit Acceptance, at 22.99 percent, so she would pay $15,300 in total over the course of five years.
Anderson bought into the Credit Acceptance motto. She’d had a car repossessed before, and the lender gave her a second chance at redeeming her credit score. Working for a janitorial service in metro Detroit, she needed a car, too. Her grandmother co-signed on the loan.
The Impala didn’t last long, she said. It got repossessed twice, the second time voluntarily because the car broke down on Interstate 94 outside of Detroit and repairs were unsuccessful afterward.
Even after voluntarily repossessing her car, Anderson continued making payments. Her work shifts were sporadic at the time, so if she couldn’t pay in full for a month, she immediately called the lender and worked out an arrangement. Still, she said she vowed to pay something—even for a car she no longer even had.
That apparently wasn’t enough. In December 2017, she received a letter in the mail notifying her that Credit Acceptance had secured a court order to have her wages garnished. The company started having nearly 25 percent of her wages docked per check.
“I was paying them,” she said. “Why even garnish me if I’m still giving you the money? I’m not even driving the vehicle.”
After talking it over with her mother, she decided to declare bankruptcy and reached out to Millitello.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to file bankruptcy this young,’” she said. “But at the same time I can’t have them garnishing my check.”
In the cases that are still open, at least 171 defendants have filed for bankruptcy. The 36th district court has received 1,696 orders for bankruptcy stays from defendants in these cases.
Following the Great Recession, the rate of auto delinquencies continued to increase, as lenders loosened the purse strings for low-credit buyers to access credit for a car. Sales increased to new heights, but delinquency rates have jumped in tandem, hitting a record 6.3 million people are 90 days or more behind on their auto loan—an increase of 400,000 car buyers from a year prior.
Mayer, the professor from Southern Methodist University, said he and his colleagues were surprised by the lack of prior research on the consequences of repossessions for borrowers.
Using credit reports, court records, and demographic data, Mayer and his colleagues arrived at a pointed conclusion: in states with laws that make it easier for cars to be repossessed, subprime borrowers are more likely to get approved for a loan.
“Increased credit access for borrowers is essentially the ‘bright side’ of making auto repossession easy for lenders,” Mayer told Jalopnik.
Michigan didn’t meet all the criteria for the researchers definition of a state that makes repossessions “easy,” but that’s only because it requires a repo agent to obtain a license. It’s smooth-sailing otherwise. The study’s findings crystallized just how much of an impact of repossessions can have on buyers who wind up defaulting on their loan payments: approval rates on credit applications are reduced for two to three years. The same for mortgage credit, by up to five years.
Making auto repossession easy for lenders, Mayer said, “takes away some of their incentive to screen borrowers and only lend to those who can really afford the loan.”
“This puts the onus on borrowers to understand whether they will benefit from the loan and be able to repay it,” he said. “Weighing the benefits of an auto loan against the potential costs associated with default is a challenging task for many subprime borrowers. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that prospective borrowers often don’t know the full scope of the consequences of auto repossessions.”
If dealers aren’t aiding buyers in finding a car that fits their budget, that compounds an already difficult situation. If their bill gets sent to collections, the effects can be severe. And a study earlier this year found more and more consumers are trying to stick it out and deal with debt collectors instead of turning to a bankruptcy court for relief.
Lawless, the University of Illinois law professor who co-authored the study, called the period when someone’s struggling before filing bankruptcy the financial “sweatbox.” Those who endure more than two years of this, he said, are called the “long strugglers.” Their time in the sweatbox is “particularly damaging,” according to the study.
“During their years in the sweatbox, long strugglers deal with persistent collection calls, go without healthcare, food, and utilities, lose homes and other property, and yet remain ashamed of needing to file,” the study said. “For these people in particular, though time in the sweatbox undermines their ability to realize bankruptcy’s ‘fresh start.’”
There’s one feature that stands out the most among this particular crowd, Lawless told Jalopnik. “They’re most likely to have a debt collection filed right before bankruptcy,” he said.
“Obviously,” he went on, “nobody wants to file bankruptcy. Nobody wants to go to the hospital either, but if you’re sick or need an operation, you need to go to the hospital.”
One of the reasons debt collection suits have become more commonplace in recent years is partly due to the so-called information revolution, he said.
“It’s just easier to bring these lawsuits,” Lawless explained. “It’s easier to find the people, it’s easier to track the debt, it’s easier to keep the records, it’s easier to generate the paperwork that you need to process these lawsuits.”
More than 75 percent of consumers who responded to the researchers’ survey said they agreed to some extent that “pressure from debt collectors” contributed to their findings. At the same time, over the last decade, the study found that in-court debt collection has increased.
“No one’s trying to argue there should be an easy way to walk away from your obligations,” Lawless said. “But at some point you just can’t pay the debt.”
The standard line from the subprime lending world is that low-credit buyers receive financing with high-interest rates to compensate for the purported risk they pose. But the higher the rate, the higher chance of default, and so critics have taken to assert the system is wholly designed to set up consumers for failure.
Now, Americans hold more than $1.2 trillion in auto loan debt, and with delinquencies at a high rate, critics point to the lending practices and loan terms themselves as the main driver of defaults.
“While debt collection is an important way creditors recoup their losses, when a creditor such as Credit Acceptance relies on debt collection for such a significant portion of its loans, that is an indication that there are problems with the lending practices and loan terms,” Stifler, of the Center for Responsible Lending, said. “When borrowers are set up to fail by the unaffordable terms of a car loan, of course we will see many folks who are already struggling unable to keep up with the payments.”
Credit Acceptance’s debt collection efforts in Michigan ran into a roadblock in 2005, when a local Metro Detroit court returned “numerous” garnishment requests “loaded with apparent mistakes to the attorney who had filed them” on behalf of the lender, according to Human Rights Watch.
“He filed 60 or 70 garnishment requests in a single day,” William Richards, former chief judge of the 46th District Court in the City of Southfield, told the group. “There were thousands of dollars’ worth of errors.”
Richards’ clerk asked the lender’s attorney to correct errors and provide additional supporting documentation to support their requests. Instead of doing just that, Credit Acceptance sued the court, arguing the clerk had no right to request additional documentation.
When the case eventually made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, the state’s highest-ranking judges ultimately sided with Credit Acceptance. In an opinion, the court noted that, “We recognize that [the district court] has an understandable interest in the rights of judgment debtors and in protecting them from writs of garnishment that are baseless or inflated.
“Nonetheless,” the judges went on, “the court rules do not allow the imposition of additional filing requirements on judgment creditors seeking writs of garnishment.”
Richards, who couldn’t be reached for comment, was unequivocal in explaining the impact of the decision at the time.
“We’ve got to have some role here,” he told Human Rights Watch. “We can’t just be rubber stamps.” But the ruling effectively stymied any efforts to apply scrutiny to the lender’s garnishment requests.
That might’ve been an especially tough pill to swallow for Richards, since Credit Acceptance’s main attorney got caught up in a scandal just a few years prior. In 2005, prosecutors indicted Howard Alan Katz on 308 counts of criminal contempt of court for falsifying hundreds of court records. Katz eventually struck a “no contest” plea deal on 136 of the counts that required him to spend six months under house arrest.
Katz, according to a news report at the time, filed fraudulent court documents that stated he’d notified a person when to appear in court, but in fact, he hadn’t.
When the accused defendant never showed up, Katz “sought and often got a default judgment from a judge,” the report said, “allowing him to collect the past-due money by garnisheeing the person’s wages.” Katz even had vehicles seized belonging to defendants before they even knew they’d been sued.
Katz, who couldn’t be reached for comment, denied any knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing and blamed the issue on a hired gun failing to properly attempt to serve the defendants with a suit.
Following Howard Katz’s indictment, records show a local attorney named Jason Michael Katz started routinely representing the lender in debt collection cases. Jason Michael Katz deferred comment to Credit Acceptance and wouldn’t say whether he’s related to the lender’s former attorney.
“I’m not going to answer any more questions about this,” he told Jalopnik.
Once the Howard Katz case was squared away, records show Credit Acceptance started filing more debt collection suits each year against Detroit residents. In 2007, the lender represented 1.45 percent of the 36th District Court’s total caseload. Five years later, it jumped to 5.21 percent. By last year, it reached 12.18 percent.
It’s a potentially startling reality for a court that, just five years ago, nearly became insolvent. The court that year posted an operating deficit of $4.5 million, leaving it facing “extraordinary challenges,” a report found.
In response, the Michigan Supreme Court appointed a state appellate judge, Michael Talbot, to address the issues. Talbot spent a year and a half making staff cuts and reclassifying positions, so workers would handle expanded duties, before turning the court back over to the local administrator.
Former Michigan Judge Michael Talbot
Photo: Michigan Court of Appeals
The court is in better financial shape today, and it still handles one of the largest case volumes in the U.S.—including a significant amount of filings from Credit Acceptance. Talbot had no comment, when asked about Jalopnik’s findings and the implication that fees from the lender’s cases are helping 36th District stay afloat.
Nancy Blount, chief judge of 36th District, told Jalopnik by email only that: “Our court exists to resolve disputes and to do so in a neutral and just way. We are not a revenue generating organization. Our funding unit, the City of Detroit, has a statutory obligation to fund us whether we realize revenue or not.” (A spokesperson for the mayor’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
A 2017 report on Credit Acceptance, which first highlighted the number of debt collection suits filed in Detroit, suggested that 36th District Court generated as much as $2 million in fees from the lender’s garnishment requests alone. The report from PlainSite was commissioned by an investor betting that Credit Acceptance’s stock price would tank. It suggested the company generated $2 million in fees for the court. (Blount disputed the finding, and said the figure would be much lower.)
Still, the fact Credit Acceptance’s cases now represent such a significant portion of the court’s total civil filings should be concerning to court officials, said Aaron Greenspan, PlainSite’s founder.
“From the court’s perspective, there’s no way this should be permissible,” Greenspan told Jalopnik. “It uses an immense amount of government resources to simply process the cases for this company.”
There are countless stories from across the U.S. of consumer experiences with Credit Acceptance.
But the personal toll a debt collection case can take on someone’s life—and how extreme the situation can get—is perhaps best exemplified several hundred miles away from Detroit, through Missouri resident Carrie Peel.
As gas prices skyrocketed during the throes of the economic crisis of 2008, Peel visited a dealer called Car Time and put down $1,000 for a used Ford Taurus, financing the remaining costs with a nearly $11,000 Credit Acceptance loan. With a low credit score, she had few options, so she accepted the loan at 24 percent interest, meaning she’d wind up paying a total of $17,850.
It made sense, as Peel described it to Jalopnik. Amid the worst months of the recession, Peel and her husband both lost their jobs, their house ended up in foreclosure, and with gas at $4 per gallon, they needed a more fuel efficient car.
“We were trying to reestablish our credit, and, unfortunately, because our credit scores were so low, we didn’t really have too many other options other than to go to a second-chance finance company,” Peel, 40, said in an interview.
That day, Peel signed a sales agreement to purchase the vehicle and drove off with the car, but Car Time never sent the vehicle’s title. When she headed back a few weeks later to get a copy, she discovered Car Time had closed up shop. Unable to afford another car, Peel was stuck in a frightening predicament.
Peel reached out to Credit Acceptance for help. But as a lengthy court record later demonstrated, she perhaps shouldn’t have bothered.
“As Peel continued to drive the unregistered car, she was stopped multiple times by the police and received tickets and penalties,” a judge wrote in a 2013 opinion. “She also became anxious and embarrassed over the situation, especially after being pulled over with her son and his friend in the car.”
Credit Acceptance said she’d need to file suit and secure a declaratory judgment to win back her title. But it wasn’t until Peel lost her job and she qualified for Legal Aid that she learned, under Missourilaw, “if a buyer is not provided with a title to the vehicle, the sale is void and the buyer is relieved of the obligation to make payments on the debt,” the judge wrote.
Operating in Missouri since 1992, one might expect Credit Acceptance would’ve known this. But after speaking with no less than 111 Credit Acceptance employees, Peel got nowhere. Instead, the lender insisted she had to continue paying the full amount of each payment as stipulated in her sales agreement.
“Never once was she permitted to speak to a supervisor even though she was promised many times,” Bernard Brown, her attorney, told Jalopnik.
When Peel finally connected with Brown, they dug in and took Credit Acceptance to court. What they learned was just how much debt collection means to the company.
Testimony from Credit Acceptance showed the company employs more than 400 collectors—about one-third of its total staff—to make calls and chase down defaulted buyers for loans. Buyers hamstrung by obviously difficult situations like Carrie Peel.
Jurors ultimately found Credit Acceptance had violated state laws in its handling of Peel’s situation, and awarded her $1.1 million in compensation. Judge Gary D. Witt, the appellate judge who wrote an opinion that later upheld the decision, was unequivocal about the lender’s actions.
“CAC contends that it is difficult to ascertain any harm that Peel suffered. CAC asserts that when the whole picture is taken into account, the only ‘real loss’ Peel sustained was the difference between driving a titled car and driving an untitled one,” Witt wrote. “This argument shows CAC’s continued indifference to Peel’s plight.”
The case perhaps explains why attorney Brown wasn’t surprised by the amount of cases filed in Detroit’s district court.
“This kind of stuff has been done across the country,” Brown told Jalopnik. “It’s an anomaly that [Brown’s co-attorney on the case] Dale Irwin and I were in Missouri and happened to fight this battle.”
Throughout the ordeal, Peel said she made her payments on time, each month.
“They’re such terrible people, they really are,” she said. “They tried to destroy me. They thought I was going to go away.”
Attorneys in the Detroit area said that conditions in the city are ripe for Credit Acceptance to mount such a high number of cases.
“When you live in Michigan, the roads are shit, so it’s expensive to keep a car from falling apart,” said Adam Taub, a Detroit-area attorney who handles auto loan-related cases. “This disproportionately affects the poor.”
Millitello, the bankruptcy attorney, called the increased number of collection cases a growing “crisis.”
“They know when they’re giving out these subprime loans that some of this income is going to come in from wage garnishments collections,” he said. “These cars are crapping out on [consumers]. They’re junk.”
It’s hard to say how Credit Acceptance’s founder Don Foss feels about the stories some of his consumers have shared. Foss retired in 2017.
Today, the small lender he took public 25 years ago is enjoying a warm reception from Wall Street, with its stock price jumping from $286 per share a year ago to the current price of $415 per share. The 74-year-old’s success allowed him to purchase a 13,000 square foot mansion in the Detroit suburb of Franklin. Across 3.5 acres, the Foss residence has nine bedrooms and six bathrooms.
He built his empire off a business that routinely drags residents in neighboring Detroit into court day in and day out, over cases that time and again are shown to be dubious at best, over cars like Denita Anderson’s busted Chevy Impala.
And so goes the cycle of Credit Acceptance.
“When the car falls apart, the consumer can’t afford to get to a job, school etc., and must abandon the vehicle and seek other transportation,” attorney Taub said. “CAC repos the vehicle, sells it at auction for what it’s worth… less repo and other fees, and this results in a judgment of at least the full amount financed along with any force placed insurance charges that accrued before the repo.”
“So it’s no wonder that there are so many CAC judgments in 36th District Court,” Taub lamented. “This is one way in which our society keeps people in economic servitude.”
_______________________________________________
Please find the original article here: https://jalopnik.com/how-a-subprime-auto-lender-consumed-detroit-with-debt-a-1829527899
While the economy was booming after the last downturn in 2009/10, the average loan being taken on by the consumer went up from around $25K to around $31K for a new car. All this while, adding about $1.2T ( Yes, Trillion) in auto loans.
I found an interesting article which can be read here:
Auto lending in the midst of an economic collapse is never pretty, as people stop paying on their car loans to divert money to more immediate necessities like food and shelter. This collapse is no different.
In an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19, state governments have implemented social distancing guidelines, travel bans and restrictions, quarantines, shelter-in-place orders and shutdowns. These actions have caused economic hardship in the areas in which they have been implemented and have led to an increase in unemployment and resulted in many consumers delaying payments or re-allocating resources, leading to a significant decrease in our realized collections.
In short: an unspecified number of people have stopped paying on their car loans, the full extent of which Credit Acceptance can’t reveal yet.
If all of that is to be somewhat expected—Credit Acceptance’s business is lending money to people who might not be able to afford it long-term—a somewhat more alarming situation is in a different report out this week.
Exhibit B: Ally Financial, which was founded over a century as the lending arm of General Motors. It was known as GMAC until, er, the last economic crisis about a decade ago, a few years after GM sold a majority stake in the business. Today by volume it is one of the biggest auto-loan lenders in the country; Monday it said many of its more reliable borrowers weren’t so reliable anymore.
Ally Financial Inc. said 25% of its auto-loan customers have asked for payment deferrals, and the vast majority have never been delinquent before.
Of the 1.1 million borrowers who requested forbearance, more than three-quarters have never asked for a deferral before and 70% have never had a late payment with Ally, Chief Financial Officer Jennifer LaClair told analysts during a conference call Monday.
Exhibit C: Lenders like Volkswagen Credit, which said last week it was waiving payments for six months for some people who have lost their job because of the virus. It’s a preemptive admission that you can’t get blood from a stone, I guess. But that also came with some stipulations:
To qualify, unemployment must not occur within the first 90 days of ownership. The customer must have lost their job because of economic reasons and must be collecting unemployment benefits. Customers also must have been employed full time at least 12 consecutive weeks before job loss. The offer is good for 12 months from the date of purchase.
The program does not cover leases, and it is not available in New York.
The lending arms of most of the other big automakers are also offering various deferment plans for borrowers, which delay payments until the end of the loan. Edmunds says that most lenders prefer to deal with customers on a case-by-case basis. The best thing you can do if you can’t make your payment is to reach out and try and strike a deal. I myself fear that increasingly many borrowers won’t even be able to afford that.
My son asked me yesterday “why are the oceans salty” and I literally didn’t have an answer as to why they are salty and where their salt comes from- so decided to do some research. This is why the oceans are salty
Ocean salt primarily comes from rocks on land
Some areas of the ocean are saltier than others. This image shows methane mussels living at the edge of a underwater brine pool in a cavern at a depth of 650 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. The pool of brine in the foreground is nearly four times as salty as seawater and is so dense that a submarine can float on the pool (in fact, this photo was shot from a submarine).
Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land.
The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid (which forms from carbon dioxide and water).
As the rain erodes the rock, acids in the rainwater break down the rock. This process creates ions, or electrically charged atomic particles. These ions are carried away in runoff to streams and rivers and, ultimately, to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Others are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time.
Two of the most prevalent ions in seawater are chloride and sodium. Together, they make up over 90 percent of all dissolved ions in the ocean. Sodium and Chloride are ‘salty.’
The concentration of salt in seawater (salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand, on average. Stated in another way, about 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts.
By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet thick, about the height of a 40-story office building.
In the beginning, the primeval seas were probably only slightly salty. But over time, as rain fell to the Earth and ran over the land, breaking up rocks and transporting their minerals to the ocean, the ocean has become saltier.
Rain replenishes freshwater in rivers and streams, so they don’t taste salty. However, the water in the ocean collects all of the salt and minerals from all of the rivers that flow into it.
It is estimated that the rivers and streams flowing from the United States alone discharge 225 million tons of dissolved solids and 513 million tons of suspended sediment annually to the ocean. Throughout the world, rivers carry an estimated four billion tons of dissolved salts to the ocean annually.
About the same tonnage of salt from ocean water probably is deposited as sediment on the ocean bottom and thus, yearly gains may offset yearly losses. In other words, the ocean today probably has a balanced salt input and output (and so the ocean is no longer getting saltier).
