I was a big enough believer in crypto to literally start a company in this space only to leave it completely disenchanted and deeply pessimistic about the direction of the industry. I felt that there were many real legal and regulatory challenges that governments just didn't want to deal with. No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
Now we're in a situation that's so much worse than I ever imagined -- Trump coins are vehicles for naked bribery and corruption with a sprinkle of encryption on top. I was worried about black markets, Trump has literally been using his office to grant access to top holders of his scam coin.
This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
+1 to this - exactly the same experience. I started a company in the space because I believe that the decentralized technology and its ability to have world impact is truly amazing.
But after spending ~2y in the space, I realized another thing -- the people in this space right now are in it purely for speculation and monetary gains. There's a lot of talk about decade long horizons, but any app that achieves pmf in the short to medium term has to cater to the speculators or die.
We chose not to go down the path of launching a coin or doing speculative stuff, even though the demand for it was intense. We hit some PMF around creators, but didn't have the conviction that it would scale without speculation. A year down the line, I believe that was the right pov to have.
>No government wants to enable money laundering, black markets, corruption and terrorism; or so I thought!
what ever gave you that thought? There are countries that do this right out in the open. The rest of the countries do it in various shades of gray to not be right out in the open, but still visible for those that can see in higher bit depths of gray than black and white
I mean, how much details do you need for this to be understood? Every tinpot dictator openly run black markets, are the definition of corrupt, while many openly operate or support terrorist organizations within their borders. Depending one looking at the US from the point of view of someone living in a country they have rained freedom down on for the past quarter century probably feels the same towards the US. Launching missiles from a remotely operated drone blowing up buildings while incurring civilian casualties definitely has the feeling of terrorism to me. They just hide it under the veil of defeating terrorism shades of gray.
I really feel like your comment was much more noisy than mine ever was.
John Adams told us the Constitution is intended for a moral (or virtuous) people.
The point is the law isn't self enforcing. People have to insist upon Constitutional order, not because of (blind) faith in it, but because the alternative is tyranny. Not anarchy.
Does this country deserve Constitutional order? The People abandoned it by electing someone virulently and openly opposed to it.
The regulation you seek is utterly meaningless in an autocracy. Or even in a unitary executive theory of Constitutional order.
But in the specific case of Trump, among the most untrustworthy liars America has produced, what does Constitutional duty mean to him? What does it mean that he took the oath of office? He said the words but no serious person believes he took an oath.
People still have no idea what we've done. And what is yet to come.
The POTUS is a psycho. And the replacements aren't good people either.
100 days down, 1369 to go. It's going to get much worse.
> This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
I really wonder how you come up to that conclusion especially that there is more than a degree of regulation. If regulation will not apply for the top anyway, then it's better to remove all regulation.
Removing crypto regulation only benefits those at the top and scammers, since it gives them one-sided control of the market with few consequences. Which is exactly what's happening.
> Now, imagine the uproar that might ensue from some corners today if a textbook made this sort of direct comparison between two groups, with one group happening to be white and the other black. Some social justice warriors would no doubt raise an outcry. The book would be branded as Eurocentric, racist, and white supremacist, since it doesn’t give equal space to describing the intellectual achievements of the Zulu or to recognizing the validity of indigenous ways of knowing. The picture of the African witch doctor might be described as a “culturally insensitive caricature”. The book would also be criticized for not describing ways in which Zulu society is more healthy than contemporary American society.
This textbook is from 1929 and was probably being written at the exact same time as the Snopes monkey trial (1925). You're reading science hype because science was under attack; and not from "social justice warriors" but from conservative Americans. Notice that the single most transformative discovery in all of biology, evolution, isn't mentioned.
That attack on evolution is still taking place. In Texas there was an attempt to strike all references to evolution and climate change from the curriculum, along with other attempts to introduce biblical references. When did that take place? That was this year; oh, and in 2023:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/texas-education-board-...
Getting mad at "social justice warriors" for an imagined reaction while ignoring the actual attacks on science is... well, it's what I've come to expect.
I still thought that passage was interesting. It is a totally reasonable prediction of how much of public health would read it.
The post and your comment emphasize how the impact of science depends more on the public than the handful of scientists who create it. Roughly ~0% of people understand any given scientific topic. It will always be completely asymmetric. It will always involve stuff like belief in an ideology, struggles for political power, (relatively blind) trust in a movement or leader, etc. As a result, there is no world in which scientists don't regularly harm whoever follows them, the same as any leader in an uncertain/asymmetric environment (by getting stuff wrong accidentally, or actively abusing their power for personal gain).
The part about social justice warriors is actually interesting because that view will come across as "we hate science!" to some people but the real idea is somewhere between "successful science requires exerting some political power over other people" (obviously true) and "western science was built on a foundation of coercion and oppression, making lots of technological progress and causing some unavoidable tragic effects." Whatever the "truth" is, it's really complicated ethically.
Interesting point RE the Snopes trial. You are right, evolution is not mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. Even though it is foundational to understanding the human body (in particular some weird features it have which any half-good creator would never design that way.)
The SJWs / woke cult are a bit of a personal hobby horse for me. I think it is important to mention, since woke ideology comes from academics at top universities, as well as journalists at top media outlets -- people who have a lot of power to shape the public discourse and influence public policy. The power of Christian fundamentalists over society and culture, on the other hand, has been waning, if one looks over the past few decades. Yes, they are in the ascendancy at the moment with the 2024 election and whatnot, but overall their influence is waning. Of course, both anti-science from the left and from the right are issues we should worry about -- I'm just giving an argument why we might want to be a bit more worried about anti-science from the left. How much either issue is discussed probably greatly depends on what circles you run in.
Note I did mention how there is no discussion of sexual health or women's health in the book. That is an issue with health textbooks that has been improved a lot but still exists to some extent today due to Christian conservatives.
When will you feel like you all have won the war here? What is it that you need to happen? Is it simply a matter of removing academics you deem too woke from their positions, or is it more a matter of public opinion becoming less woke? Just really at this point trying to get a gauge for how long we have to live inside this particular discourse.. Because it just structurally is such that it cant last forever, for I hope at least to you somewhat obvious reasons... (Although I wouldn't be too surprised if this is truly a gnostic battle against darkness for you personally. There are some variants here.)
I just miss when yall were simply libertarian and talked about taxes! We can go back to that one day right?
> When will you feel like you all have won the war here? What is it that you need to happen?
I was involved in a previous iteration of the culture war (religion vs atheism) pretty heavily. If this is anything like that, it'll start fading once people feel like the cultural dominance of the group is broken.
If you want a rule of thumb, hollywood being considered non-woke and universities not requiring diversity statements (cultural conservatives consider these to be roughly isomorphic to the old loyalty oaths) would be generally what to look for.
Edit: These institutions losing their influence would probably also be sufficient. There's nothing inherently important about hollywood, so if another locus of entertainment gains prominence, and it has different cultural views, that would also qualify.
Ok the diversity statement thing seems pretty actionable. Hard to say about hollywood I guess bc its feels very subjective: one guy's "woke" is always going to be another's "fun/wholesome" or whatever.
But for the universities ok, this is at least a thing we can hold onto. It's a little rough to implicitly associate the "diversity" considered in hiring/enrolling at a school with the evil professors, because the entire argument then quite easily contracts down to: "there are too many non-white academics, and that is the real problem." But I guess the whole point is to free ourselves from such silly concerns like racism, institutional or otherwise.
Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want. I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence, but its easy to see now that all the people who care about the "wokeness" are, yeah, exactly like creationists: they just want to feel represented, they just want the blurb in the textbook; its not so much about the world outside, but just how they feel about it; that its ok for them to be angry about the kids sports team or whatever. People want to be principled!
I am truly hopeful at this point they will eventually find some peace while still allowing everyone to live with some self-determination and everything else. Its a little long in the tooth now, but hopefully the recent political ascendency will temper it a bit.
> Hard to say about hollywood I guess bc its feels very subjective
It definitely is. But so was my iteration. A good chunk of the previous iterations of the culture war have been as well. A lot of my generation really didn't like how conservative the small towns we grew up in "felt", it felt oppressive and dumb.
> Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want.
Yeah, I'm not participating in this one. I missed a few years of the culture war during a raging alcoholic phase and both sides feel really foreign nowadays and kinda confusing. But I do occasionally like to pop a bag of popcorn and watch people fight.
> I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence
My guess is probably not much more than the 70s (and we're still a long way from that, there were ~2500 bombings in an 18 month period in 71 and 72), but it seems really unlikely to advance to civil war levels.
Both things can be true, and there are real world examples of attacking western science as eurocentrist and what not. The imagined reaction is based on those criticisms.
What far-end conservatives learned and what sjws are starting to discover is that mainstream exposure is a trap. You can get Walmart to say "Merry Christmas" (instead of happy holidays) or "Black Lives Matter", but that doesn't actually translate to any material church attendance or racial equity. All it does is create the illusion that your side is more of an oppressive force than it actually is, which alienates moderates like the author who can potentially be allies.
That last point about differences between dev, test and prod should be right at the top. It's rare to find teams that have set themselves up for success (for reasons I do not fully understand)
Although you're right that there's likely no relationship between wives developing heart conditions and subsequent divorce, there's not enough information from the article to know whether there's anything statistically meaningful about heart conditions specifically. It seems more likely that it's just statistical noise. I read that section and got the impression that the relationship is interesting but it doesn't necessarily mean anything, rather than implying that the original study still has some validity.
In my opinion kubernetes is fundamentally hamstrung by the overly simplistic operator model. I really like the general idea, but it's not really possible to reduce the entire model down to "current state, desired state, next action." It means that an entire workflow ends up in the next action logic, but with so many operators looking at the same system state it's not really possible to know how the various components will interact. The problems with helm are a subcase of this larger issue.
By analogy, this is the same issue as frontend programming faces with the DOM. Introducing a VDOM / reducer paradigm (like react) would go a long way towards solving these problems.
> it's not really possible to reduce the entire model down to "current state, desired state, next action."
This is basically how control theory works in general though. You have a state, a goal, and a perturbation toward the goal. I think this is the right level of abstraction if you want a powerful and flexible tool.
> it's not really possible to know how the various components will interact....Introducing a VDOM / reducer paradigm (like react) would go a long way towards solving these problems.
I think the problem here is that the physical characteristics and layouts of the machines makes such a huge difference that it would be prohibitively costly to virtualize or simulate this in a meaningful way. So instead, people use subsets of the physical structure to verify that configuration states work. You do this by having `dev`, `staging`, `prod` environments, using colored deployments, canary analysis, partial rollouts etc.
> I think this is the right level of abstraction if you want a powerful and flexible tool.
This says nothing about ease of use. And for software development, ease of use matters. Otherwise we would all use assembler, or at most C++. They're very powerful and flexible.
If anything, too much power and flexibility is a problem.
The contents of the letter are interesting in their own right, but there are 2 aspects that strike me as particularly interesting. First off, he doesn't seem to regret killing his wife, more the consequences of his crime. He doesn't mention her by name or say that she didn't deserve it.
Secondly, the person he's corresponding with, Fredrick Brennan is fascinating in his own right. He's one of the 3 central characters inside the HBO documentary, Q: Into the Storm, and has a totally bizarre relationship with Jim and Ron Watkins, the two figures currently steering the ridiculous QAnon set of conspiracy theories. It's a very strange confluence of interests.
He regrets “killing” other’s dreams about working on his file system.
He’s a psychopath. The whole write up does not discuss anything that was asked and he just wants recognition and fame for inventing something (queryable file system) that was already released long before that, namely BeFS, by the real file system god, Dominic Giampaolo who also wrote APFS
He does mention her by name once, but only in passing:
> I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.
> I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.
I have never heard of, seen or even got wind of a "QAnon" member, group, theory, website or whatever they say it is outside of mainstream news. According to them it's some huge group of evil people but I can't tell myself that they're a real thing. If anyone has any real world, personal experience I would love to hear it.
If you have a subscription, the HBO documentary I mentioned, Q: Into the Storm is excellent. I think that the struggle mainstream news orgs have in talking about QAnon is that it's very difficult to encapsulate all the interlocking conspiracies and figures. There's also a wide degree of variance for what various bits and pieces mean, but there are a few central tenets. The main one is that there's a mysterious high ranking figure in the government, Q (who gets his name due to the Q-level security clearance he or she has). Q makes very abstract posts on 4chan -- and then other sites -- that seem to suggest that there's a massive pedophile ring inside the government and that Donald Trump is working to expose it from within. Many figures are implicated and, by strange coincidence, they happen to be figures that the far right detests. The Clintons and Bill Gates take starring roles but honestly it's impossible to keep track of it all.
Into the Storm is centrally focused on the identity of Q, but in the process of pursuing the answer the creator of the documentary, Cullen Hoback, ends up going on an absolutely wild hunt. I find documentaries of this sort to be a bit hit-or-miss, but this is one of the best of its subgenre. The subculture and background surrounding QAnon is interesting in its own right but, of course, the real highlight is the characters. Fredrick Brenan, Jim & Ron Watkins, and Hoback himself are fascinating individuals.
I would find it easier to believe there is a pedophile ring inside the government and Donald Trump is involved, especially considering his association with Epstein.
QAnon (often shortened to Q) is the name given to the persona that has been adopted by a few different individuals and is almost certainly currently controlled by Ron (principally) and Jim (secondarily) Watkins. Calling the posts "Q intel drops" is coded language the tells me you are intimately aware of the QAnon conspiracy group. Let me be clear: Q is some random dudes larping on the internet to give their own pathetic lives some level of importance they do not deserve. Q is a fictionalized persona.
I don't mean this as an insult, but after looking through your post history, you should consider psychological counseling. I recognize the coded language you are using. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you are in a cult. These people are taking advantage of you.
Although no lead is insurmountable, the fixed capital investment and mature software ecosystem specific to this sector makes it harder to imagine what a competitor would look like.
Given how large the prize is, the next chapter of chip development is likely to be nvidia vs state sponsored projects. China, in particular, will funnel further resources into acquiring this technology by any means necessary, including (more) industrial sabotage and outright theft. It's going to be interesting to see how this will play out. Up until a few years ago China was viewed as being a formidable competitor for projects of this nature, but as the country has moved to become increasingly authoritarian, so too have its decision making and execution declined in quality.
There are some really profound misunderstandings of how bankruptcy and credit work in this thread.
Creditors are ranked by seniority and get paid out in order by seniority. Equity is below every creditor and has been completely wiped out. Companies are not allowed to take cash or sell the furniture to pay out employees. That money is legally owed to creditors and attempting to stiff them is theft. I'm sorry to those affected at Convoy, but that is the reality of working at a startup that goes through a hasty liquidation. Convoy is not being "cheap" about this, as some are suggesting. Any "retention bonuses" are to keep executives around for long enough to unwind the company in an orderly fashion. Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse.
As for the larger situation: Convoy were a digital freight brokerage. They acted as intermediaries between shippers and carriers and make money on the spread between the two. They got into trouble because the entire freight sector has been suffering a double whammy of cost increases due to inflation (ie. diesel costs) and a slowdown in demand. This has caused a number of carriers and brokerages to go bust. Freight brokerage has some other properties that make Convoy's situation particularly serious. In particular, carriers typically securitize their accounts receivable. In freight, this is known as "factoring." Convoy got stuck holding the bag after their partner carriers went under, having already paid them for their service, but still waiting for payment from the shipper.
Worst of all, Convoy had no exits because their only potential acquirers are in the same industry and are also getting completely crushed.
While in general what you are saying is true, employees owed wages are the highest seniority of creditor. As long as you were selling furniture for reasonable prices to make payroll, you should be fine.
Wages are fourth priority, but only up to $12,850 per person (one month's salary at ~150k a year).
The three priorities above wages are child support (not really applicable to corporate bankruptcy i assume), liquidator's expenses, and some mildly complex case i don't really understand. Taxes are eighth, two behind grain farmers and fishermen (lol America).
I think that this list might be talking about unsecured claims though. I think that secured claims might be separate. So, for example, if an individual declares bankruptcy and they owe $500k on their house, that claim would come before child support payments. I am definitely not a lawyer and bankruptcy law strikes me as particularly complex.
The third priority is tough to parse. From looking over it quickly, it seems like this might be claims from doing business between when i file bankruptcy and when i go into foreclosure. Again, not a lawyer, but my guess here is that if I'm a store and I file bankruptcy on Monday, but don't have a trustee until Wednesday, and I put in an order for a palette of water bottles on Tuesday, then the distributor of the water bottles might have a priority claim.
Obviously it depends on the jurisdiction. In countries with strong employees protections, redundancy payments have a high priority during administration.
I realize one possible misconception is severance vs "gardening leave" [0].
They look really similar, but legally entirely different.
In "gardening leave" you're still an employee and on payroll until the last day. Whereas severance you're not an employee and typically paid lump-sum (but doesn't matter for this discussion). So in this specific situation, yes, that would be wages and would be paid out first before creditors because you are _legally_ entitled to those wages.
The problem of course you cannot hope to put a whole company on "gardening leave" in hopes that it can "act as severance" for everyone. Your creditors will sue you and easily win. They'd probably put an emergency injunction on the company and remaining funds before the first month was even completed once they learned of "creditors hate this one little trick!"
You have X months notice ie the company has to tell you X months before yoir severance date.
Often the company will want somone they let go out of the office ASAP.
Thus you spend your X months on gardening leave paid as normal wages.
On your severance date you get your redundancy package - in the UK there is a defined minimum but in some markets e.g. finance they pay more as they do want to keep current employees happy so they see that they just don't get thrown out.
As much of the US is at will employment I doubt this scenario will occur often
It can happen during a partial acquisition where the relevant employees are likely to cause damage to or steal the product/property before the acquiring company has finished the acquisition (e.g. software with wide access that needs to be untangled).
The usual one I hear about is someone who’s in generally in good standing and who has a significant stock award coming, but who just isn’t “working out” and management gives them the gift of finishing out their term to get the bonus
It's not the way it is calculated. All payments attached to employment contract are wages, be it regular salary, bonuses, vacation pay or severance. Say the contract defines severance of 1 month for each full year worked capped at 3 months: at the moment contract reaches 1 year anniversary, the employee should be owed 1 month worth of severance upon contract termination
I've worked in the sf tech industry my entire career and my employment contracts have never included guaranteed severance. I've seen severance being paid out to fellow employees but afaik it is done as courtesy and wasn't legally required.
> my employment contracts have never included guaranteed severance
My assumption was that we would not be talking about "unpaid severance" if there was no severance defined in the first place.
> Are you European? Maybe it's different there.
Generally severance is not legally mandated, but can be mandated under some specific circumstances, e.g. no-notice termination. Usually it is similar to US: either defined in collective (union) agreement or part of termination contract.
Well your assumption is wrong. There was no defined severance, people are saying that Convoy should have paid severance anyway because its the “right thing to do” when laying off employees. And others are saying they couldn’t because of creditors coming first.
All official information mentions “shutting doors” and “winding down” and not necessarily a bankruptcy. For instance, in the same space, Shone just returned part of the equity to the investors, paid comp to the execs for a full year, and us, employees, got jackshit.
IDK if Shone did things the most intelligent way, but the general story is not uncommon.
Shareholders/creditors have a mess if the CEO and CFO walk out the door for their new job; it is financially beneficial for them to liquidate assets and shut the door.
Shareholders/creditors don't have a mess when the engineer and a product manager walk out the door to their new job.
This stuff doesn’t require the CEO or CFO either. Receivership doesn’t even require the active participation of the board, so yes there’s some benefit of keeping existing executives around but that’s often offset by the costs of doing so.
How would it possible help in this situation? The game is over and everyone knows exactly where all the money is. It will just be distributed back to the creditors and then remaining to the shareholders. Who needs the CFO for that? Basically anyone could run that process.
Words have different meaning in different contexts.
If your CEO is looking at records of individual office chairs when unwinding a billion dollar company someone has seriously fucked up. They don’t and shouldn’t know the details by memory.
However, the details are either available so everyone ‘knows’ them as soon as they become relevant, or the executive officers have been committing serious financial crimes.
Maybe they need something in bankruptcy law that requires the executives to stick around, at low pay, to do their jobs and unwind the company. After all, they're the ones who made it fail. Why should they be allowed to walk away?
If a regular individual declares bankruptcy and then doesn't bother doing any of the required paperwork and legal stuff, saying the court needs to pay them top dollar for their time, things will not go well for them.
You mixed up a lot of things here. On practical side: execs, and accounting already legally must do paperwork, however shareholders want them to go well beyond that. And you can't force people to do job properly just by legally obliging them, otherwise Soviet Union would not fail.
On moral side: business in general (and startups especially) requires navigation between things many of which are unpredictable, and plenty are beyond your control. Also I've seen startups failing because of software bugs, and technical limitations. In this particular case, do you know about any obvious wrongdoing? If not you probably shouldn't auto-assigning blame on "them".
Again, try declaring bankruptcy, and then refusing to do any more paperwork or show up for the bankruptcy hearing with the judge, and see how it goes for you.
In fact, bankruptcy is a process that, if you follow the rules, is beneficial to you: you get protection from your creditors so that your loss is minimized. If you refuse to do the labor to follow this process, you won't have any protection and things will go badly for you. I don't see why it should be different for the owners and executives of a corporation. These people are not employees.
There’s no obligation to run a company into the ground. If a company reaches a point where the end of its runway is in sight, and the company decides to let employees know that the company will be out of money in 2 months, to give employees time to start looking for options… that’s allowable and not some sort of theft from creditors.
Many companies are open with employees about the state of the business.
If you have less than 3 months runway and little prospect of any fundraising, tell your employees. You don’t need to steal money from creditors (?) to pay severance, you just gotta do your best to not blindside people who have rent to pay.
> Convoy had no exits because their only potential acquirers are in the same industry and are also getting completely crushed.
Some great insights here and you clearly know the business. I’m curious about this last statement however. Just how badly are other players doing?
Uber Freight just announced a major overhaul on a foundation apparently provided by their acquisition of Transplace [1]. There seem to be a number of synergies between Convoy and Uber Freight although I may be naive about that. In any case, I’m curious about your view on Uber Freight and whether they are viable or simply playing the long game based on deep capital reserves, and why you think they didn’t acquire Convoy (if that even makes sense as a possibility).
Uberfreight is also doing very poorly. From my understanding the Transplace acquisition was somewhat of a merger/UF trying to get out of only the 3PL business and Uber is just trying to get UF's losses off their books. There are not as many synergies as you might think due to the way freight brokerages and their deals with shippers+carriers work. One reason UF didn't acquire Convoy: it only makes sense for a brokerage to acquire another brokerage if they can get more customers (shippers) from that acquisition. But most customers of UF are also customers of Convoy, and are splitting their loads amongst multiple brokers to diversify risk and commoditize brokerages. So if you're a shipper giving 20% of your business to Convoy and 20% to Uber Freight, you won't turn around and give 40% of your business to UF now that they've acquired Convoy, you'll just go find another broker to give your business to.
Just to clarify your point about paying out employees... in what sense do you mean that? Some quick googling says that when a company goes into Chapter 7, employees become creditors for their unpaid wages, which means that they are at least in the same boat as other creditors (although it seems like they might sometimes be prioritized).
Your source is talking about unpaid wages (legally mandatory), but severance is additional (legally optional) payments the company chooses to make to support former employees.
That sounds like bullshit (i.e., it shouldn't be this way, I'm sure you're correct). Being a landlord should entail a certain amount of risk: you're betting the tenant will be able to pay the rent, so you need to be careful choosing tenants, especially if they're companies, and moreso if they're companies with risky finances.
Why should employees be prioritized below a property speculator?
There are plenty of people who get paid out before the landlord, especially when you're several months in arrears as you almost always are in this situation. It's why in other markets landlords will be pretty quick to evict non-paying commercial tenants, there's a lot of risk and minimal personal guarantees unless it's a brand new business.
"Convoy got stuck holding the bag after their partner carriers went under, having already paid them for their service, but still waiting for payment from the shipper."
This doesn't make any sense. What you're describing is normal course of business. Shipper pay terms are usually longer than when the carrier get's paid from broker. "Carrier's went under", doesn't make any difference. If the shipper doesn't pay, than that's a problem. But to say paying carriers that "went under" contributed to Convoy going out of business just isn't accurate.
This however is not a bankruptcy case, but a wage theft case.
Going through a perfectly legal bankruptcy procedure is very different than working your severs 72 hours a week for years without overtime then refusing to show up at court.
This comports with my understanding that piercing the veil usually requires illegal behavior.
I don't understand your point? It is a simple concept that wage liabilities, eg a last check that bounces, or 'wage theft'[0], can result in those liabilities passing through to become personal liabilities of the company's owner(s).
Again IANAL, and ymmv based on specific circumstances, but piercing for unpaid wages is very much a thing in (at least) California law.
I understand what you said, I just don't think it is true and none of the provided sources say so. Meanwhile, everything I have read says they are simply priority creditors up to a limit. Beyond the limit, judges will pay other creditors before employees.
>Because claims for unpaid wages due to insolvency do not fall under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) unless the employer willfully failed to pay wages owed and filed for bankruptcy as an attempt to avoid paying wages, the U.S. Department of Labor has no jurisdiction in this area and will not accept claims.
You really don't seem to. The allowed recourse, under contention, for unpaid wages due to bankruptcy isn't via the FLSA, its a lawsuit against the company's owners. If you run a taco stand, don't pay your employee, and then declare bankrupcy - validly or not - you will plausibly be held liable, as person, not an LLC, in civil court for those wages. To be paid from your personal assets and or garnished from future income.
Also your quote literally says 'unless declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying wages.'
This seems to establish precedent that unpaid wages by a bankrupt company, even in the absence of serious misconduct, are sufficient justification for veil piercing:
> The case therefore would up presenting a clear question of law: Where the workers are employed by a corporation, can an individual be held liable for penalties associated with statutory violations in the payment of wages where there was no allegation or finding that the corporate laws had been misused or abused for a wrongful or inequitable purpose? In other words, do sections 558 and 1197.1 allow workers to recover civil penalties for nonpayment of wages from individuals even when there are no other grounds for piercing the corporate veil under the doctrine of alter ego?
> The court of appeal concluded that under the clear language of sections 558 and 1197.1, the State of California, through the Labor and Workforce Development Agency (“LWDA”), can recover penalties associated with unpaid wages from individuals. Furthermore, PAGA allows employees to stand in the shoes of the LWDA and recover those penalties. Accordingly, employees are also permitted to recover those penalties from individuals.
>The only ambiguity to me in reading this is whether the court considered it different because the wages went unpaid for a while before bankruptcy.
This is my entire point.
If you go into chapter 7 bankruptcy, and a judge prioritizes senior creditors above unpaid wadges, you are clearly in different territory than if the corporation was neglecting wages before bankruptcy.
Everyone keeps linking cases for pre-bankruptcy cases, or ones without bankruptcy at all.
Meanwhile, There laws on the books about the prioritization or creditors, and where labors stands, and how much labor gets paid out before, and how much after other creditors.
> ...another industry faces the same problem: startups. The opportunity to create
the next big thing has “long lured ambitious entrepreneurs into shiny
co-working spaces and startup accelerators” in Silicon Valley, but the
reality is that most startups fail.15 These failures can be crushing for
all those involved.16 Not only does the death of a startup mean the loss
of a job and the death of a dream, it also means a lack of funds to
compensate employees for work they have already put in.17 Although
the practice of withholding wages is illegal, it is a rather common
problem when startup founders “put off paying employees as they wait
out their next round of funding.”18 If the funding falls through, there
is often no money left to pay employees the wages they have already
earned.
> That is what happened to plaintiff Brett Voris (“Voris”) in Voris
v. Lampert.
...which is the same case I linked above. So the whole issue is how long wages can be delayed. If you're arguing that "Convoy management is unlikely to be personally liable assuming they didn't delay any wage payments whatsoever and their wage payment intervals are found to be reasonable by the court", then I agree. But it's rather common for some of these conditions to not hold, so the potential for piercing the veil is very real.
(Perhaps you are arguing against other people who think that unpaid wages are always considered theft, in which case I would agree with you. I was respondsing to the comment "you cant prosecute a dead entity for theft"; often you can, and it depends on the details, which I presume are not yet public for Convoy.)
> If you're arguing that "Convoy management is unlikely to be personally liable assuming they didn't delay any wage payments whatsoever and their wage payment intervals are found to be reasonable by the court", then I agree.
This is exactly what I am auguring. Convoy isnt even delaying any wage payments. They are not paying severance or providing transition healthcare/COBRA.
It seems like Voris v. Lampert case had a much longer delay, and the court still decided against the the plaintiff.
I did learn that there is more case law on piercing the vale for wage than I realized, but everything I read still suggests that a legitimate bankruptcy without serious/illegal executive misconduct will not lead to piercing of the veil.
They paid their carriers before being paid by their clients? That is pretty bad cash flow management, and risk management. And it is decidedely not what forwarders I know do. Forwarders, e.g. DHL freight, rarely own their trucks and subcontract that out, much like a broker does. And those subcontracted carriers are usually the last to get paid in that line.
Unless, of course, Convoy had to because all their carriers insisted on upfront payments for reasons. In which case Convoy was propably already screwed any way.
What you are saying is true, but that doesn't mean a lot of underhanded "games" aren't played.
"Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse."
Here's one such game. Executives, who enjoy information asymetry, and leverage can parlay this into one final earning event. Threaten to leave the company in disarray, unless they're paid. Coordinated, it's hard to say no to.
Imagine if the top 5-10 execs at an otherwise ok startup coordinated a demand to double their pay/stock or everyone walks tomorrow. They time the move using inside knowledge of cash flow, making the demand irresistible.
I'm not suggesting an alternative, but that doesn't mean a corpse isnt a feast for some.
Unless the law has changed, in California back pay is senior to everything except tax debt. And the company officers are personally liable for it.
It should work that way everywhere. Executives need to be incentivized to do layoffs while there’s still cash for it. Defrauding employees is a terrible evil.
We didn’t get our final check. The class action suit went on for several years and the lawyers got all the money. I believe I was entitled to something less that $100 in the end and I declined.
> Companies are not allowed to take cash or sell the furniture to pay out employees...Any "retention bonuses" are to keep executives around for long enough to unwind the company in an orderly fashion.
Could you help me understand where the line is drawn?
Now we're in a situation that's so much worse than I ever imagined -- Trump coins are vehicles for naked bribery and corruption with a sprinkle of encryption on top. I was worried about black markets, Trump has literally been using his office to grant access to top holders of his scam coin.
This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.