> lawyers are extremely selective on what cases they take.

Which is why people should never infer anything from stuff like "we win 98% of our cases." Easy to win if you pick cases you know are a slam dunk.

I'm genuinely confused: I have no thoughts about your ideas/beliefs. What makes you think I do? I reacted on a public forum about a piece of news, that's it. I even said I'm happy that people seem heartened by this update - and I mean it!

To borrow your metaphor: I'm a bus passenger who is a bit grumpy that we are taking a 30 minute detour but just informed by the driver than he made up 10 minutes via shortcut. I'm not telling the driver to drop me on my front porch.

I don't enjoy interactions with insults, but I'll respond one last time.

If you care about the money, then saying "great, $36m" should instead be: "it sucks, we are still have $79m ($115-$36m) less than what we should to fund important stuff". It's not whataboutism: it's about the scale of the problem, and that small victories don't compensate (in my view) for much bigger screw-ups.

As for your other message (which I missed): I'm not afraid of anything? Why would I be afraid? As I said twice: it's great that they are getting this money (if they ever get it). But I would feel better if (a) they hadn't wasted three times that amount for seemingly no good reason, and (b) I was confident they would use it on something more else than more law enforcement.

In the end, I find this administration disappointing: it neither provides progressive policies (universal income was abandoned on day 1, the PD gets more money than ever, blaming local residents for lack of check on crime) nor more centrist ones (see the thread about downtown). At this stage, I find the weekly "CommUnity" tweets hard to swallow. But given the downvotes I'm receiving, I'm glad to see that others are more optimistic.

With this being said: this is one of these discussions which would be easier around a beer. I wouldn't be surprised if we agreed on more than what our exchange would suggest.

Oh, that would make more sense.

Since I apparently didn't write clearly: my disappointment is that there is so little money coming from all this. Not that we should forgive UPMC &co. And I should add that Gainey was fine leaving $115m on the sideway with OnePGH (link. So yeah, that $36m is a bit underwhelming in my view, especially since Gainey already promised a chunk to the police force.

$36m is nice, and I'm all for proper enforcement of tax law. But that's an amount comparable to usual fluctuations from year to year in revenues. It doesn't hurt, but this was a big theme during the elections last year and seen as key to Pittsburgh's progressive agenda. Surely they had other aspirations than fighting for what is roughly a rounding error in the annual budget?

> "It’s roughly $36 million per year."

Minus all the expenses for future lawsuits, of course.

More seriously, the city's current total revenues is about $706m per year (link). So this would only increase the city's revenue by 5% (assuming they succeed in all cases)? Did they end up finding fewer 'fake' tax-exempt properties than they thought? Or was that always the expectation?

If I recall correctly, one the earlier reports had a quote saying something like "Meriçli declined to respond to requests for comments" or something like this. Makes the complaining here a bit less credible in my view. As does the following quote:

> It’s unknown how many of Locomation’s estimated 122 employees faced termination. Mericli declined to provide specifics.