India (among other countries) have passed so called "hostage-taking laws" that require large social media companies to have in-country employees that can be strong-armed from ways small to large (threats of being convicted of treason and executed).
This is a specific policy to allow them to enforce their censorship laws in other countries.
If there is a single Facebook employee on Indian soil, that Facebook cares about, then obviously, yes they can enforce it, simply by being mean to those Facebook employee(s).
It seems like India's stance is: If you want to do business in India, you have to have employees you care about on our soil, so we can be mean to them if you do something we don't like.
Facebook's stance appears to be: We like your money enough that we will comply with this.
I'm just glad I'm not one of those Facebook employees.
"Either have employees in-country so we can intimidate them so you'll do what we want, or we block your service."
Sounds pretty effective? Sure, some people will get around the blocks, but it'll be a relatively small percentage (especially if the government makes circumventing these blocks illegal, most people won't find it worth any risk to do it anyway), and your service will be effectively destroyed in that country.
Payroll is one of the very few (only?) things that "pierces the corporate veil" - that is, the principals / board members are personally liable even in the event of corporate bankruptcy.
You could engage a labor lawyer, but if this was pre-series A and the founder was self-funding, there might not be any personal assets there either.
If you think the folding of the company is in good faith, you might just want to take the loss on this one.
> If you think the folding of the company is in good faith, you might just want to take the loss on this one.
This is astonishingly bad advice! It is the fundamental opposite of what you should do in this situation!
If you work for someone, you deserve to be paid for your work. Full stop. There are state agencies to assist with this exact situation that are funded by your tax dollars, avail yourself to them!
What you think happened to the company is immaterial. I am genuinely baffled by the phrase “folding of the company in good faith” as I can’t imagine a good faith reason to tell people to work for free based on how your feelings align in relation to a business entity.
The only people that would benefit from this becoming the norm would be con artist founders that are working to perfect an “Aww shucks, payroll is sooo hard for a smol bean like me!” excuse for getting folks to work for free.
I would also not work for anyone that would even slightly agree with this advice.
Actually, there is no "folding in good faith" in such like cases.
A company is bankrupt if a point in time can be foreseen, where the company can no longer pay its debtors (employees here are debtors, sometimes even a higher-priority class of such). And while one can argue about the "foreseen" part, e.g. by saying "I did reasonably expect that incoming payment to arrive, which didn't". As soon as you were unable to pay a debt once, or like here even twice, you are actually too late in declaring your bankruptcy. Which, in most jurisdictions, is a crime. And it certainly is in bad faith. If the company isn't actually bankrupt, could pay but won't, then it is also an act of bad faith.
I don't think there is something like good faith and failing to pay payroll. As an entrepreneur I have failed before and never have I considered payroll money as something I can use for other purposes.
Go for it, sue and put in jail whoever owes you payroll money. Jail is a very good motivator to pay what's owed.
Do not take this loss. You should if you are a founder and decided not to take salary, but as an employee this is unacceptable. That money is yours.
In many jurisdictions failure to pay wages is criminal theft. If someone takes money out of my wallet without my consent, that's theft. The fact that it was stolen before it even made it into my wallet doesn't make it not stealing.
They absolutely shouldn’t “take the loss on this one”, what kind of an asinine comment is that?
OP performed labor at an agreed-upon rate. The hypothetical broke and failed founder should “take the loss”, even if it requires taking on further financial burdens.
Externalized risk is one of the most rampant and harmful moral hazards of this age.
For what it's worth, I "took the loss" in a similar situation. The owner put everything he had into the business, it legitimately failed, and I didn't want to kick him while he was down. My financial situation was such that it didn't hurt me too badly. I could imagine pushing harder if the situation had been different, either on my end or on his.
The tone of this comment is completely out of line. We probably disagree on many things, yet your comment makes sense to me. So does the comment you're replying to.
It's not clear it's asinine: the cost of trying to recoup money from an entity that is completely out of money can very easily become not worth it.
The comment I replied to said OP should take the loss if they think the failure is “in good faith”. This implies that OP should give up what they’re owed to take pity on the failed business’ owners.
That would be giving the owners a pass on the risk that should be inherent in starting a business venture at the expense of OP’s already-delivered labor.
I stand by my tone. That kind of risk shuffling is cancer to the whole realm of private ventures and contributes to general distrust of business as a means of organizing and motivating collective human action.
One thing to consider is that Startups, Tech, the bay area, and life in general is a very small world. You'd be surprised how some good faith spread around becomes a nepotistic interview invite a few years later.
Regardless the founders should pay their employees.
As a founder, I would never feel good about not paying staff. Taking care of “your people” has to be a primary responsibility or else you are spitting on their loyalty and sacrifice.
However the extent to which they should take this case is pretty wide.
At least the guy should ask for his wages.
Maybe he should insist on them if he needs it.
Should they sue the founders and get an lien on their houses? I don’t know.
The first two shouldn’t remove good faith or good feeling. The third means bridges burned.
Presumably the founders that cannot pay their employees in this “good faith hypothetical” do not feel good at all about not being able to pay out. I would imagine they feel defeated and embarrassed.
In retrospect, you were correct my tone and rhetoric were out of line. I think siblings to my original comment (written by cogitoergofutuo and itsthecourrier) did a better job by more directly problematizing the "good faith hypothetical" itself. Mismanaging your way to missing payroll twice with no satisfactory communication about it and no promises to make it up is hard to classify as "good faith", even if bad luck was involved.
But I also concede that, in some cases, the cost of recouping might not be worth it.
I think the parent comment is about the likelihood of recovering enough money to make the exercise worthwhile, rather than the propriety of getting ripped off.
The Plot Against America is alternative history and build on real people, organizations, and events. They are the same organization. But I guess that means that I can add the Catholic Church from Hyperion as a fictional brand too.
This exactly. For most small non-profs, basic IT upkeep - i.e. cleaning adware, patching vulns, getting backups set up and tested - is going to be so much useful than occasional airdropped code with no regular/timely maintenance plan
But careful even donating "patch time" since doing security updates and all the rest inherently change things.
Non-profits are pretty bad at documenting requirements, or having any sort of automated testing, so you go in and upgrade some things, or patch some things, and they're still going to need training... and they're still going to need an organization-wide test to make sure everyone can still get what they need out of the tech. Inevitably someone will have some plugin that isn't compatible with the upgraded version, or someone will have some service that needs to get re-built to fire reports nobody knows about until they don't show up in the right inboxes.
Money the org can use to hire a staff member who will be a "permanent" fixture is always going to be better for them than someone coming in and doing work and not sticking around to support it.
It's interesting to me that crypto is mostly the only place in tech where this (this is all a waste) is a widely accepted idea.
As someone else has correctly mentioned, ads (and tracking), are sadly the lifeblood of a lot of tech action and are arguably just as (if not more) exploitative. It's just slower and more subtle.
As for crypto itself, I get why it's not an attractive idea, and yes -- a very good bit of it is scam-city, but I'm compelled to admit that the cryptobros are generally correct when they describe the state of the dollar today -- even if their proposed solutions often leave much to be desired.
Is it though? 1% of the time an ad helps me discover an interesting product I wasn't aware of. That's still better than the value crypto has added to my life.
About 1% of the time I pay for something, I use crypto. That's better than the value ads have added to my life (which is negative).
Neither of our anecdotes cancel the other out. People can value different things, and that's ok! I'm amazed people spend their time telling others what they should and shouldn't value. I don't watch football and it has no value to me, but I don't go around telling people they should stop watching it too. If humanity were less self-centered and more empathetic, we'd approach everything this way, including football, ads, and crypto.
Ever tried to work for multiple countries with multiple banking systems? Total nightmare. When I was in England invoicing a US client required me to have a US bank account for them to pay (I ended up having to use an umbrella corp to make the payments easier as they had existing infra for a cut). Now I'm in the US when I invoice European clients payments take ages (2-3 days), when I invoice UK companies they tend to want to pay local bank accounts, and when I invoice Asia it's almost always a nightmare. USDC is instant, I can withdraw to my account in minutes, and the fee is lower. I know remittance payments from places like US to Nepal is far easier than trying with normal banking options. Even Wise still takes days instead of minutes for some transactions.
> I know remittance payments from places like US to Nepal is far easier than trying with normal banking options.
Okay, but the Nepal client still has to remit payment/receive payment with some source in their traditional payment system, so this doesn't really solve the issue unless they decide to operate all in USDC.
It's not a terrible burden coming from the US, but you've likewise offloaded the problem of having a US bank account onto me, where I now have to transfer my USD into USDC to pay you. It's not hard because I already have a Coinbase account, but it would take a few days for added funds to be released so I can send them to you. It's certainly not easier than something like Zelle.
Ultimately, nations aren't going to give up control of their money systems: China, for example, might use blockchains for a digital Yuan, but you can bet they will be holding the validator keys. Problems bridging between blockchains are as bad, if not worse, than problems bridging between traditional financial systems.
Point is, you're seeing a localized benefit from USDC because you've offloaded the problem of bridging between systems onto your clients, but that doesn't fundamentally fix that there are bridging problems. And even if every system moves onto blockchains in the future, that won't solve those bridging problems--in fact, it will almost certainly make them worse in the short run.
Ads impose a cost on everybody who sees them. People see thousands of ads per day, which to my mind is the psychological equivalent of breathing car exhaust and drinking lead-poisoned water. Crypto doesn't have nearly the reach, though I agree it's similar (on a smaller scale) in its waste of talent and its enrichment of careless, greedy, unscrupulous people.
Assuming that 1% is even true (I'd say that's an overestimate), the other 99% of the time, ads are distracting, misleading, and manipulative, all in ways that are bad for your mental health because they make you feel like you're not safe enough, your life isn't interesting enough, you don't have enough, etc. Even if, like me, you're fastidious about unsubscribing from ads and blocking ads, advertisers are adept at shoving their shite in front of you in violation of your consent.
Cryptocurrencies are pretty bad, but at least if you ignore them, they don't find you and directly harm you.
I think I have to reluctantly agree. At least you can mostly just ignore “crypto” (unless you’ve been in the market for high-end graphic cards I guess), which is more difficult to do for ads. Ads also cause the engagement maximization dynamics of social platforms, dynamics which arguably have turned out to be a huge societal net negative.
But you can’t ignore its effects, such as the environmental impact. If cryptocurrencies had zero effect on the people who don’t use them, there wouldn’t be such a large opposition.
You are right, but I believe that ads are overall still much worse in their negative effects. It also wouldn’t surprise me if ad tech consumes more energy worldwide in browsers than bitcoin mining does.
Debatable, but also a false dichotomy. Being punched in the arm is better than being punched in the nose, but that doesn’t mean any of them is positive or should be welcomed.
Most blockchains aren't highly used. I agree it's good we're moving off of that, but until Bitcoin fixes its act, it's still a shockingly awful waste of resources.
I don't know. Market makers for stocks at least have real utility. If I own 10,000 shares of $some_actual_company and want to sell it to buy a house, it's good that there's someone who's constantly pricing the stock.
In small European stock exchanges without HFT actors, buy/sell spreads on individual stocks can get large and daily volume very small, so you need to do more planning around any trade that's larger than "retail nickles". This is not great for attracting investors to these stocks, even if the companies are worthy.
But in crypto, there's no underlying value. There are no worthy companies who deserve more investor attention, no tokens that should be in anyone's long-term portfolio for any reason but FOMO. It's a 24/7 nothingburger outlet.
>There's no underlying value. It's a 24/7 nothingburger outlet.
That's not really true. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, and speculation may be driving most of price, but these are real tech products. Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, Solana are decentralized computing platforms, with utility. Uniswap, Aave are exchange platforms, that allow people to swap currency real time.
They may not be VMWare, Rackspace, JPMorgan Western Union or Moneygram, but they are real companies, with real products, that offer real services.
As of 2021, Allianz, Deutsche Telekom, Intel and Cisco are four stocks where investors that bought at the Dotcom Bubble peak never broke even. Maybe Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, Solana are far above their actual potential value, but it doesnt mean they are worth 0.
> That's not really true. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, and speculation may be driving most of price, but these are real tech products. Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, Solana are decentralized computing platforms, with utility. Uniswap, Aave are exchange platforms, that allow people to swap currency real time.
That is still speculation and most of the existing financial system can do payments (the supposed original use case) already.
Take a look at UPI, Pix, etc. A safer, faster and better future of payments is already being built and used to the tune of hundreds of millions of real people. And it is not a complete pyramid scheme.
That cannot be said for crypto, nobody is using it for anything other than speculation, crime and ransomware.
The loss just on the lasers is 100x (i.e. delivered power is 1% of the input energy). Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50%, you're looking at needing a 200x improvement to have commercially relevant "net gain"
Yes but NIF's lasers date back to the 1990s, and laser technology has improved a lot since then. NIF-class lasers with over 20% efficiency are available now.
What do you mean? That article says the claim is false. LCD monitors emit blue light whether you want it or not anyway. Merely setting something in the OS to change the color temperature does not eliminate blue light and I don't think it even necessary changes the color temperature.
