A manufacturer can put whatever language they want in the purchase agreement. Ultimately it is a judge who decides whether it is "reasonable" to hold the manufacturer potentially liable for a particular incident when multiple things probably did not go quite right to cause it. Once deemed potentially liable, the manufacturer's deep pocketbook is in the hands of the jury. The pieces of paper the purchaser signed do not necessarily matter.
There are loopholes for hobbyist and experimental vehicles that build greater legal protection to the manufacturer. But in those cases, the purchaser is responsible for final assembly, thus proving they are expert enough to understand the kind of liability they are taking on. Such is used for aircraft, mostly. It is never going to apply to consumer purchase of cars bought by normal means.
The tradeoffs are interesting. It is worth noting that a century or so ago, insider trading was simply legal. When the question came up before a judge, the judge just shrugged and said that it seems natural enough that being CEO has its benefits when it comes to dealing in the company stock. It was legislation that brought the idea of insider trading into being.
That sounds nice in theory, but it is not logically possible to have complete information available, ever. What would that even look like? Should I let the world, including our competitors, read all my work email? Does the public get to peruse our defect tracking system? Should a put a webcam in every meeting room and broadcast it through a youtube channel?
As a practical matter, lines must be drawn somewhere and reasonable attempts must be made to discourage employees from crossing those lines, so that it is not too easy to game the system. That is all that can be done. There is never going to be an unambiguously correct place to draw any ethical line. They is never going to be perfect enforcement of any ethical rule.
If employees can be "overworked" are they really your best?
Not for long.;)
I do get your point. I am not saying what you describe is not common. I do argue that uninsightful managers feel trapped into doing things one particular way because it feels safe, because it feels like it is their only reasonable choice. When it is not.
It makes sense only because of such low interest rates that all kinds of unwise proposals can look pretty good on a powerpoint presentation under those conditions. When safe bonds are paying 1%, offering 2% is an easy way to find suckers.
Furthermore, the equity company itself might be doing just fine. I do not know the details about ToysRUs, but in the case of Sears, the owners of the equity company also owned a sister commercial real estate company, that "helped" Sears out of a cash crunch situation brought on by bad management. That sister company bought about $8-$10 billion of real estate from Sears for $3 billion cash, and rented the property back to Sears. So the equity company itself may looked trashed on paper, while the owners of the equity company make $5 billion elsewhere.
But overworking employees by not being willing to make important hires loses you your best employees, over the long haul. Are you well enough off getting 75% of the projected revenue in a company that is good at its work, and can grow from there? Or do you prefer being stuck in a downward spiral of getting 90%, then 80%, then 70%, then 60%, , etc. of the piece of the pie you wanted, with no way out of the hole except to make excuses about it being a tough market to hire in?
I recognize that the second option sure seems safe in the short term, and is very popular as a result. But is it reliable?
In fact, Theranos had a big song and dance about being too awesome to cough up lab data or peer reviewed papers, as is normal in this business space. A lot of companies looked at Theranos and most of them refused to consider writing checks, for this very reason.
The people who wrote the checks bought into the "visionary thing", and did not follow standard business practices in the pharma and diagnostics medical space. I feel no pity for them, even if I believe Holmes should face consequences.
In fact, it is very rare for executives to go to jail, no matter how egregious, no matter how much they knew.
In this case, she is the "visionary" with no college degree and no world experience. Her lawyers can plausibly argue she was hands off and relied on experts for the important details.
I am not suggesting she should not be punished -- I am for it. But her case is unusual in a number of respects. Worrying over specifics about gonads is premature.
It is old school business classes that taught them the way to be a successful manager is control costs, as if workers were just another ingredient to pour into a big machine that manufactures product.
If you really need someone with significant technical, "overpaying" them 20% does not matter, if the business is using their skills very effectively. Of course, that implicitly throws the responsibility on the managers.
They do not want to pay more probably because they suck at their jobs. In a real business, you pay, say, $1 million in salaries, $1 million in various business costs (rent, insurance, advertising, etc.), charge $3 million for your services and the business owner pockets $1 million in "profit" (which has to pay off the capital/investment costs to create the business in the first place). In this context, arguing over whether your salary costs are $1.00 million or $1.02 million, when you need to pay a little extra to hire key people the whole business running well, is pretty idiotic.
If willoughby offered the opinion that it is better to hire a lawyer, fine. The poster decided go for blaming the victim with this "truly believe" argument. Well...
I expect adults here to notice that women literally get lectured with diametrically opposing moral arguments. Oh, you didn't work hard enough to use channels, what a whiner. Or you didn't hire lawyers, you do not really believe yourself.
That different people say these things is not important. This dynamic is the overt moral context in which this discussion takes place. Open your eyes, and step into the adult world like an adult, before lecturing with moralistic tones.
Your playing the Victim Card on his behalf only strengthens my point, that the problem is moral stupidity. Grow up.
Leaking, like espionage, is often a genuinely good thing for human civilization, because they can reveal intentions in a way that well-prepared media events do not.
It is really important to keep changing the rules so we can label the women as always in the wrong.
If they do not go nuclear by hiring a lawyer and getting the feds involved, instead of attempting to work through company channels, we can cast doubt about whether they "truly believe" there is a problem.
If they do go nuclear, we can just call them disgruntled employers who never really stood up for themselves and tried to work things out like adults fit to live in the real world.
You are just whining because you are unwilling to think. Those are clearly not random insults and you know it. They are insults based on reasons (that reasonable people can agree or disagree with), mixed with a bit too much hyperbole (for my taste).
Evidence to support your hypothesis is conspicuously lacking.
Do you really think the people writing the checks have not noticed that they could fund 4 start ups in the Midwest for the price of 1 in Silicon Valley? 25 years ago SV cost twice as much as some smallish town near a good engineering school. Now it is four times as much.
Obviously there is some point where competitive parity is achieved, but it is not going to be because new college grads stop sucking less at competing with the pros than those who came before them. It will be because enough seasoned pros are available locally that you can build out a company with them and fill in the less critical position with new grads.
Clarification: I mean by "constriction of the low-wage sector as prices shift" that the supply of low-wage labor can decrease, in a self-reinforcing spiral.
Rent control is not necessarily the problem, I agree with you there, but a symptom of a much larger problem. Cities restrict housing development for local political reasons -- mostly anxious middle class families who go NIMBY to protect their house value. Then rent control becomes "necessary". Most cities could easily build much more housing. Maybe that is not true about Manhattan but it is certainly true about Greater NYC as a whole.
Build more housing. Housing is fungible. Developers are happy to build housing for the filthy rich and the rich and the non-poor, if cities chose to be helpful about it. That makes the so-so housing the poor need more affordable, as recent college grads earning 6 figures are not forced to bid for the nicest of those same units.
I am not sure about NYC, but SF could easily build a lot more housing than it has. It is doing vastly more than in the past, but it is still much much less than what could be done.
I more than sympathize with the non-rich having it rough in these cities. IMNSHO SV is on the cusp of enormous local inflation, as the number of workers who are willing and able to work the less well paying jobs is growing very slowly compared to the demand. $10/hour is a joke. There are a dozen businesses I drove by on my short commute who cannot fill jobs for $15/hour. What is going to happen is businesses will be forced to both increase wages and prices. But broad increases in prices will make the area even more unaffordable. The poor might sleep more per room, but they still need to eat. We could easily see a sudden constriction of the low-wage sector as prices shift.
It is a safety issue, as it is theoretically possible for a car to roll down a hill into traffic. But, no, it is not normal to cite for that, unless there is a real accident as a result. Even a 5% grade is not enough to create more than a tiny risk of the hand brake failing, so people are failing to curb all over our cities on 5% grades. And when handbrakes fails, what happens? A car slowly rolls somewhere and gently stops against something. Whatever. You do not actually need to write a ticket to a car owner who is obviously embarrassed that their car could have been mangled by their own stupidity.
Of course, this particular ticket was a complete fraud and the person writing it up knew that. They could have dropped tickets on 30 cars on that same block for the same "offense" because no one ever curbs their wheels on a 1% grade. The reason that did not happen is presumably a supervisor could not quite ignore the problem performance of a parking enforcement officer who causes 10-20 appeals for one day's work, especially when those appeals might eventually get upheld and raise uncomfortable questions about whether the supervisor is instructing reports to file phoney tickets.
Write three phoney tickets a day, and you can probably get away with that forever, and earn high marks from your supervisor for good performance. How many are going to be appealed? And after the first two appeals are denied, how many people actually file the third and final appeal?
Unfortunately high home prices tends to create a self-reinforcing anti-virtuous cycle. The heavy financial burden of home buying creates enormous anxiety about anything and everything that could possible cause the price to dip or even rise less quickly. The more financially successful an individual person, family, or community is, the more likely they are locked into this mindset.
Thus NIMBYism is on the rise, and it only seems to be getting worse.
FYI they definitely do not even read your first appeal. My wife did eventually win on the incorrectly filed parking ticket (she did not curb her wheels on a road with a 1% grade that was surveyed as a 1% grade, cited for not curbing wheels on a >4% grade).
Indeed. People who are actually conservative by modern political standards and technologists are a minuscule minority, because the conservative mindset clashes with the required open-mindedness. We do, however, have lots of mavericks. Mavericks are all over the map, and we have many libertarians and anarchists and socialists here. People sometimes get excited by pointing at people like Thiel -- "oh, look! a conservative!" No. He is a maverick with strong libertarian tendencies. Put Thiel in a room full of regular folk conservatives and sparks will fly ("regular folk" not meaning fellow billionaires, but people who get their hands dirty for a living).
This handwaving article only makes these nominal "leaders" sound vacuous in their treatment of the issue. Not saying that these people are vacuous. Or not. However what comes through is a lot of whining while they are coddled during their looking-for-tax-breaks-from-cash-strapped-cities tour.
In a nutshell, if you need to grow a company very quickly for strategic reasons, you need access to many seasoned engineers or you will be throwing your money down the toilet. You cannot just import 5 solid engineers from the Valley and hope that 50 college grads mixed in will figure it out -- that doesn't work.
There are many options if your business model is around organic growth over a decade(s). But that is not really what this article is about.
Indeed. CRISPR and public blockchain are powerful technologies. In the 19th century, the railroad was a set of awesome technologies, ones that we depend on today for our modern economy, where almost every early company went bankrupt, while a few clever and ruthless insiders pocketed a lot of money. The past may be giving us hints about the present.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure they will try.
A manufacturer can put whatever language they want in the purchase agreement. Ultimately it is a judge who decides whether it is "reasonable" to hold the manufacturer potentially liable for a particular incident when multiple things probably did not go quite right to cause it. Once deemed potentially liable, the manufacturer's deep pocketbook is in the hands of the jury. The pieces of paper the purchaser signed do not necessarily matter.
There are loopholes for hobbyist and experimental vehicles that build greater legal protection to the manufacturer. But in those cases, the purchaser is responsible for final assembly, thus proving they are expert enough to understand the kind of liability they are taking on. Such is used for aircraft, mostly. It is never going to apply to consumer purchase of cars bought by normal means.
The tradeoffs are interesting. It is worth noting that a century or so ago, insider trading was simply legal. When the question came up before a judge, the judge just shrugged and said that it seems natural enough that being CEO has its benefits when it comes to dealing in the company stock. It was legislation that brought the idea of insider trading into being.
That sounds nice in theory, but it is not logically possible to have complete information available, ever. What would that even look like? Should I let the world, including our competitors, read all my work email? Does the public get to peruse our defect tracking system? Should a put a webcam in every meeting room and broadcast it through a youtube channel?
As a practical matter, lines must be drawn somewhere and reasonable attempts must be made to discourage employees from crossing those lines, so that it is not too easy to game the system. That is all that can be done. There is never going to be an unambiguously correct place to draw any ethical line. They is never going to be perfect enforcement of any ethical rule.
If employees can be "overworked" are they really your best?
Not for long. ;)
I do get your point. I am not saying what you describe is not common. I do argue that uninsightful managers feel trapped into doing things one particular way because it feels safe, because it feels like it is their only reasonable choice. When it is not.
It makes sense only because of such low interest rates that all kinds of unwise proposals can look pretty good on a powerpoint presentation under those conditions. When safe bonds are paying 1%, offering 2% is an easy way to find suckers.
Furthermore, the equity company itself might be doing just fine. I do not know the details about ToysRUs, but in the case of Sears, the owners of the equity company also owned a sister commercial real estate company, that "helped" Sears out of a cash crunch situation brought on by bad management. That sister company bought about $8-$10 billion of real estate from Sears for $3 billion cash, and rented the property back to Sears. So the equity company itself may looked trashed on paper, while the owners of the equity company make $5 billion elsewhere.
Well, yes.
But overworking employees by not being willing to make important hires loses you your best employees, over the long haul. Are you well enough off getting 75% of the projected revenue in a company that is good at its work, and can grow from there? Or do you prefer being stuck in a downward spiral of getting 90%, then 80%, then 70%, then 60%, , etc. of the piece of the pie you wanted, with no way out of the hole except to make excuses about it being a tough market to hire in?
I recognize that the second option sure seems safe in the short term, and is very popular as a result. But is it reliable?
In fact, Theranos had a big song and dance about being too awesome to cough up lab data or peer reviewed papers, as is normal in this business space. A lot of companies looked at Theranos and most of them refused to consider writing checks, for this very reason.
The people who wrote the checks bought into the "visionary thing", and did not follow standard business practices in the pharma and diagnostics medical space. I feel no pity for them, even if I believe Holmes should face consequences.
In fact, it is very rare for executives to go to jail, no matter how egregious, no matter how much they knew.
In this case, she is the "visionary" with no college degree and no world experience. Her lawyers can plausibly argue she was hands off and relied on experts for the important details.
I am not suggesting she should not be punished -- I am for it. But her case is unusual in a number of respects. Worrying over specifics about gonads is premature.
It is old school business classes that taught them the way to be a successful manager is control costs, as if workers were just another ingredient to pour into a big machine that manufactures product.
If you really need someone with significant technical, "overpaying" them 20% does not matter, if the business is using their skills very effectively. Of course, that implicitly throws the responsibility on the managers.
They do not want to pay more probably because they suck at their jobs. In a real business, you pay, say, $1 million in salaries, $1 million in various business costs (rent, insurance, advertising, etc.), charge $3 million for your services and the business owner pockets $1 million in "profit" (which has to pay off the capital/investment costs to create the business in the first place). In this context, arguing over whether your salary costs are $1.00 million or $1.02 million, when you need to pay a little extra to hire key people the whole business running well, is pretty idiotic.
If willoughby offered the opinion that it is better to hire a lawyer, fine. The poster decided go for blaming the victim with this "truly believe" argument. Well...
I expect adults here to notice that women literally get lectured with diametrically opposing moral arguments. Oh, you didn't work hard enough to use channels, what a whiner. Or you didn't hire lawyers, you do not really believe yourself.
That different people say these things is not important. This dynamic is the overt moral context in which this discussion takes place. Open your eyes, and step into the adult world like an adult, before lecturing with moralistic tones.
Your playing the Victim Card on his behalf only strengthens my point, that the problem is moral stupidity. Grow up.
Us adults have no problem praising a specific action by a person we might have strong misgivings about. It is only confusing to children like you.
Leaking, like espionage, is often a genuinely good thing for human civilization, because they can reveal intentions in a way that well-prepared media events do not.
It is really important to keep changing the rules so we can label the women as always in the wrong.
If they do not go nuclear by hiring a lawyer and getting the feds involved, instead of attempting to work through company channels, we can cast doubt about whether they "truly believe" there is a problem.
If they do go nuclear, we can just call them disgruntled employers who never really stood up for themselves and tried to work things out like adults fit to live in the real world.
The women always lose. That is what is important.
You are just whining because you are unwilling to think. Those are clearly not random insults and you know it. They are insults based on reasons (that reasonable people can agree or disagree with), mixed with a bit too much hyperbole (for my taste).
Evidence to support your hypothesis is conspicuously lacking.
Do you really think the people writing the checks have not noticed that they could fund 4 start ups in the Midwest for the price of 1 in Silicon Valley? 25 years ago SV cost twice as much as some smallish town near a good engineering school. Now it is four times as much.
Obviously there is some point where competitive parity is achieved, but it is not going to be because new college grads stop sucking less at competing with the pros than those who came before them. It will be because enough seasoned pros are available locally that you can build out a company with them and fill in the less critical position with new grads.
Clarification: I mean by "constriction of the low-wage sector as prices shift" that the supply of low-wage labor can decrease, in a self-reinforcing spiral.
Rent control is not necessarily the problem, I agree with you there, but a symptom of a much larger problem. Cities restrict housing development for local political reasons -- mostly anxious middle class families who go NIMBY to protect their house value. Then rent control becomes "necessary". Most cities could easily build much more housing. Maybe that is not true about Manhattan but it is certainly true about Greater NYC as a whole.
Build more housing. Housing is fungible. Developers are happy to build housing for the filthy rich and the rich and the non-poor, if cities chose to be helpful about it. That makes the so-so housing the poor need more affordable, as recent college grads earning 6 figures are not forced to bid for the nicest of those same units.
I am not sure about NYC, but SF could easily build a lot more housing than it has. It is doing vastly more than in the past, but it is still much much less than what could be done.
I more than sympathize with the non-rich having it rough in these cities. IMNSHO SV is on the cusp of enormous local inflation, as the number of workers who are willing and able to work the less well paying jobs is growing very slowly compared to the demand. $10/hour is a joke. There are a dozen businesses I drove by on my short commute who cannot fill jobs for $15/hour. What is going to happen is businesses will be forced to both increase wages and prices. But broad increases in prices will make the area even more unaffordable. The poor might sleep more per room, but they still need to eat. We could easily see a sudden constriction of the low-wage sector as prices shift.
It is a safety issue, as it is theoretically possible for a car to roll down a hill into traffic. But, no, it is not normal to cite for that, unless there is a real accident as a result. Even a 5% grade is not enough to create more than a tiny risk of the hand brake failing, so people are failing to curb all over our cities on 5% grades. And when handbrakes fails, what happens? A car slowly rolls somewhere and gently stops against something. Whatever. You do not actually need to write a ticket to a car owner who is obviously embarrassed that their car could have been mangled by their own stupidity.
Of course, this particular ticket was a complete fraud and the person writing it up knew that. They could have dropped tickets on 30 cars on that same block for the same "offense" because no one ever curbs their wheels on a 1% grade. The reason that did not happen is presumably a supervisor could not quite ignore the problem performance of a parking enforcement officer who causes 10-20 appeals for one day's work, especially when those appeals might eventually get upheld and raise uncomfortable questions about whether the supervisor is instructing reports to file phoney tickets.
Write three phoney tickets a day, and you can probably get away with that forever, and earn high marks from your supervisor for good performance. How many are going to be appealed? And after the first two appeals are denied, how many people actually file the third and final appeal?
Unfortunately high home prices tends to create a self-reinforcing anti-virtuous cycle. The heavy financial burden of home buying creates enormous anxiety about anything and everything that could possible cause the price to dip or even rise less quickly. The more financially successful an individual person, family, or community is, the more likely they are locked into this mindset.
Thus NIMBYism is on the rise, and it only seems to be getting worse.
The topic just makes me sad.
I am pretty sure it is a purposeful blend of gentrifying and defecating.
FYI they definitely do not even read your first appeal. My wife did eventually win on the incorrectly filed parking ticket (she did not curb her wheels on a road with a 1% grade that was surveyed as a 1% grade, cited for not curbing wheels on a >4% grade).
Indeed. People who are actually conservative by modern political standards and technologists are a minuscule minority, because the conservative mindset clashes with the required open-mindedness. We do, however, have lots of mavericks. Mavericks are all over the map, and we have many libertarians and anarchists and socialists here. People sometimes get excited by pointing at people like Thiel -- "oh, look! a conservative!" No. He is a maverick with strong libertarian tendencies. Put Thiel in a room full of regular folk conservatives and sparks will fly ("regular folk" not meaning fellow billionaires, but people who get their hands dirty for a living).
This handwaving article only makes these nominal "leaders" sound vacuous in their treatment of the issue. Not saying that these people are vacuous. Or not. However what comes through is a lot of whining while they are coddled during their looking-for-tax-breaks-from-cash-strapped-cities tour.
In a nutshell, if you need to grow a company very quickly for strategic reasons, you need access to many seasoned engineers or you will be throwing your money down the toilet. You cannot just import 5 solid engineers from the Valley and hope that 50 college grads mixed in will figure it out -- that doesn't work.
There are many options if your business model is around organic growth over a decade(s). But that is not really what this article is about.
Indeed. CRISPR and public blockchain are powerful technologies. In the 19th century, the railroad was a set of awesome technologies, ones that we depend on today for our modern economy, where almost every early company went bankrupt, while a few clever and ruthless insiders pocketed a lot of money. The past may be giving us hints about the present.