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U.S. Gov't Still Fighting the Man Behind Buckyballs; Guess Who's Winning?
usacoder writes with news of Craig Zucker, former CEO of the company behind Buckyballs, the popular neodymium magnet toys that were banned by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in July 2012. Zucker ran a brief campaign to drum up opposition to the government's ban, but it didn't turn out to be enough. Unfortunately for Zucker, the story didn't end there. Despite the magnets being labeled as not for kids, the Commission filed a motion to find him personally liable for the costs of a product recall, estimated at around $57 million.
"Given the fact that Buckyballs have now long been off the market, the attempt to go after Mr. Zucker personally raises the question of retaliation for his public campaign against the commission. Mr. Zucker won't speculate about the commission's motives. 'It's very selective and very aggressive,' he says. ... Mr. Zucker says his treatment at the hands of the commission should alarm fellow entrepreneurs: 'This is the beginning. It starts with this case. If you play out what happens to me, then the next thing you'll have is personal-injury lawyers saying "you conducted the actions of the company, you were the company."'"
"the vast majority are frivolous lawsuits" cite sources
This has been studied extensively. Every study I have read on this shows that judges tend to toss out the frivolous lawsuit and that the majority of cases that got to trial actual have some merit.
ROTFLMA. The servers at www.cpsc.gov are broke:
Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine. Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off". Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I even read (or heard on the radio) some expert claiming that shareholders did not "own" companies, because companies were persons and laws against slavery prevent people owning other people. Yes, really! His argument was that shareholders only owned an entitlement to some share of future profits. Nothing more.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Lego has sharp corners, and an untold number of children have hurt themselves, including eye injuries. Let's switch to Duplo, the safer alternative!
Bah, when I was a kid, I was whittling, taking the bus alone and doing pyrography at age six. Kids today might have a slightly higher chance of reaching adulthood alive, but for a much lower value of "alive".
The historical complaint of old people has been that the young have been too radical and reckless. We now have the first generation where the opposite is true - the youngsters are complacent slugs, incapable of a radical thought or reckless action. Even their music doesn't suck because it's too wild for us, but because it's too boring.
Mr. Zucker says his treatment at the hands of the commission should alarm fellow entrepreneurs: 'This is the beginning. It starts with this case. If you play out what happens to me [...]
Without reference to the merits of the case, this sounds like a classic case of narcissistic paranoia.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The box had a warning label, but not the product, and unlike drain cleaner the product does not stay in the box, it's designed to be stuck to things. Furthermore the product looks like a cake decoration, a candy. In addition they then enhanced the buckyball line by introducing a range of candy colours, (oranges, pink, red, blue) from memory, the orange looked particularly delicious. The drugs industry goes to some effort to try to differentiate their pills from candy, buckyball were going in the opposite direction, it was asking for trouble. Also having watched adults play with buckyballs, they often try and make an earring, so I can imagine the following , kid A places a ball either side of their ear "look lets scare mom that I got a peircing" kid B goes one better and places one either side of their tongue" I might add I bought some chinese knockoff buckyballs, not a warning label in sight and not buckyballs fault, but a concern for the commission. Given this I understand why they product was banned, they were potentially dangerous, but in a subtle way that a reasonable person would not have suspected (unlike lawndarts), and a warning on the packaging would not be sufficient in many cases. However that said going after the company CEO for the price of the recal, that seems unprecedented and draconian, surely the point of a limited liability company is to do just that, limit the liability, if this sets a precedent forget bucky balls but go after CEO's of BP, Philip Morris, James Hardie, that will be fun and games, and see the politicians running to protect their revenue.
The product was not defective.
Many toys over the years with powerful magnets have been banned because, if swallowed, they can connect with each other in the intestine, cause blockages, tissue death, and ultimately kill the person. This is well-documented and people have died in the past. It's not a fictional or abstract problem. While buckyballs were marketed as an "adults-only toy", the fact is that many of them were in turn given to children, and the recall was voluntary -- based on evidence supporting this statement.
No harm was done that I have read.
So people have to die or be hurt before we take action? That is a morally questionable stance, at best.
No, the banks were not prosecuted, which makes this even more egregious.
It is no more or less ethical or moral that they were, or were not prosecuted. Prosecution is what comes after harm has occurred, not before, and not to prevent. Therefore, it is exactly as egregious as it would be if it were prosecuted, compared to if it were not.
He didn't make a mistake.
When you play chess, you either win, or you lose. If you lose, it's because you made a mistake. This isn't about whether he played the game well or not. This isn't about his own morals or ethics. He lost. Maybe he shouldn't have. Maybe he's in the right and the government is wrong. But he did lose.
Mistakes are not a cause for success or failure. They are not judgements of a person's character. Acknowledging them only means the acknowledgement that the intended result was not achieved. Thomas Edison made hundreds of mistakes before he created the first lightbulb. Failure is instructive. And progress is invariably filled with failure; But if we gave up after the first one, we would never accomplish very much at all.
I'm sorry that you don't understand this; Given the fact that so many cowards marked my post as 'overrated' because they disagreed with this, instead of admitting that my position was solid and defensible it seems a great many people don't. But I can't blame you, anymore than I blame them -- our society puts such pressure on people to succeed that the acknowledgment of a mistake, of a failure, is a cultural taboo.
The question this man needs to ask is... what did he learn? Going up against the government and losing is nothing to be ashamed of. Many of our greatest civil rights leaders have done so. If he's choosing to make a stand on business ethics, he should make it count for something more than simply crying foul that he didn't get the success he feel he's owed. His reaction suggests he has learned nothing from the experience, and thus, is a bad businessman. When he has figured out how to use this experience to make a meaningful contribution to his next business venture, then he will be marketable again. But right now, I wouldn't trust anything he says, or give him any of my money, because he has yet to learn a lesson from his failure.
This is the out of control Feds doing what they do best, punish people who are creative and trying to get ahead. It is about control.
Perhaps. But how many times have we, as hackers, geeks, and engineers, told someone who said something was impossible to get out of the way and let us have a crack at it? The government is simply another system to understand, program, adapt to, and eventually overcome. When you say "the government had it in for me!" -- whether it is true or not, you are letting them win. You are beaten. You have given in to despair and helplessness.
So yes, it is about control... but if you're unwilling to take responsibility for yourself, if you're unwilling to captain your own ship, it's a rather empty thing to say government control is wrong; It is better than what you are doing for yourself.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This right here might be the grounds to sue him, did he dissolve the company before the company was held liable for the costs of the recall? If the company runs out of funds that's OK, but if you funnel money out that is not.
Funneling money out after taking on liability would be called fraudulent transfer. I suspect they weren't that dumb. Based on buckyballs' website, their assets were transferred to a liquidating trust, for the purpose of dispensing with the company; therefore they can file their claims against the trust, so no... that's not a good reason to sue the former shareholders: On December 27, 2012 Maxfield & Oberton Holdings, LLC (the "Company") stopped doing business and filed a Certificate of Cancellation with the Secretary of State of Delaware, thereby ceasing to exist pursuant to applicable Delaware law. The MOH Liquidating Trust has been established to deal with and, to the extent they are valid, pay, to the extent assets are available, ....
In what world does the foreseeable uses of brewed coffee include dumping it all over oneself?
When the cup is known to become a floppy mess at temperatures below the temperature at which they filled it with contents being served at an unnecessarily high temperature which is itself in excess of the established policies and procedures.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"