It's going to keep happening until someone takes them to court.
I hate to say it but unless you're bound by an arbitration agreement in the terms of service you should just file in small claims. Even still...file in small claims and make them fight to have the case sent to arbitration. Lawyers are expensive and you won't need one in small claims.
Arbitration clauses are pretty good for consumers for small injustices. KitSplit can't litigate an arbitration for even $35,000 dollars, let alone $3,500.
You've already done most of the legwork on this. Now all you need to do is get this into small claims court.
Trust me: once KitSplit gets that notification from the court that they're being hauled into court and are going to need to hire a lawyer to defend themselves, you're gonna be working with a whole different level of people at Kitsplit. That's your best chance to get compensated.
Also having a small claims court case will quickly rack up the costs for the company if they hire a lawyer. For something like $3500 they may choose to settle.
In a handful of states, including California, Michigan, and Nebraska, you must appear in small claims court on your own. In many states, however, you can be represented by a lawyer if you like. But even where it's allowed, hiring a lawyer is rarely cost efficient. Most lawyers charge too much compared to the relatively modest amounts of money involved in small claims disputes. Happily, several studies show that people who represent themselves in small claims cases usually do just as well as those who have a lawyer.
What does Nolo say about corporations or LLCs? That's what we are talking about here.
Individual people have the option of hiring a lawyer in some states but most don't. Corporations on the other hand, because they are "legal" and not "natural" persons don't get that right. They must be represented by counsel. A corporation can't represent itself in court because it's not a "natural person". They MUST use a lawyer.
Not true. In CA, a business can hire outside counsel to advise them on the suit but outside counsel cannot represent them in court. There are circumstances in which the business can send an in-house lawyer as its agent, but never an outside one.
I'm not a lawyer but was once my former employer's agent in court in a small claims suit we filed against HP. I assure you there's no requirement that corporate parties be represented by lawyers.
In CA, the choice of court is mainly about two things: 1) The amount of money at stake, and 2) Whether you're asking the court to do anything other than award money.
Small Claims: $10K or less ($5K if plaintiff is a business), only asking for money.
Limited Civil: $25K or less, only asking for money.
Unlimited Civil: More than $25K AND/OR asking for something other than money.
As an individual suing a company you absolutely would NOT want to file in Limited Civil if you had the option of filing in Small Claims, among other reasons because in Limited Civil the company you're suing can be represented by a lawyer and the filing fees are considerably more expensive.
On the east coast (NYC in particular), things are a bit more sane in some ways and a bit crazier in others.
Of course, this is all inside baseball. As a practical matter, it's HIGHLY LIKELY that this will never get before a judge. No corporation is going to send their CEO to court to argue a case and if they can't send a lawyer to small claims, they will just submit a motion to move the case to regular civil court because reasons.
Of course, if that happens, then they've already lost. It will be FAR more expensive to litigate in plain old civil court.
For the record, IANAL but I've hired and fired a bunch of them and done this dance a few times already on both sides of the coin. Bunch of lawyer friends too. One of them was just on TV doing a press conference for his client, a Navy SEAL.
You seem to be commenting well beyond the bounds of your knowledge or expertise.
1. None of this is weird. NY has even more kinds of courts than CA does, including "limited" courts just like CA. I consult on lawsuits around the country, including in various courts in CA and NY, and NY is at least as screwy as CA in every meaningful way I can think of.
2. To the contrary, small claims suits are highly likely to make it in front of a judge. In fact, that's just about the only place they're likely to go because small claims courts strongly discourage the use of pretrial motions. A business that is sued is not required to send the CEO just because they're not allowed to send a lawyer. They can either send a regular employee or they can send no one, in which case they're more or less guaranteed to lose by default.
3. A defendant can't remove a properly filed small claims suit to a higher court just because they feel like it. The small claims venue either has to be improper or there have to be some very unusual extenuating circumstances for the courts to even consider removal. There's an abundance of case law on this, and for good reason, including in NY.
Cite sources for your assertions. You say there is plenty of NY case law then cite a couple of examples. You say that small claims cases are more likely to end up in front of a judge. How do you know this? Are you taking into account the number of cases that are dismissed because the two parties reached an agreement before trial that resolved the issue?
If you're an expert on the law and you think I'm not then PUHLEEZE demonstrate something besides an ability to google counterexamples.
When you've been sued and had to sue people you quickly develop an appreciation for how the legal system REALLY works and how lawsuits are a tool for negotiation. I will tell you that I've sued a handful of people and none of those times did we actually go to trial. We settled because the cost of a trial would have far exceeded the disputed amount.
The one time I was sued in small claims, I settled. I actually settled IN THE COURTROOM and informed the judge that he could dismiss the case.
Get some time on the pond, kid. Otherwise, go kick rocks.
You're acting like a jerk and you don't know what you're talking about but I'm going to humor you anyway.
1) Here are three from NY (there's isn't much more case law than this because small claims cases-- to my point-- are rarely removed to higher courts):
1a) Shaw v Point Lookout Toys, LLC., 58 Misc. 3d 789: "While the court appreciates the defendants' concerns, they must be weighed against the "salutary purposes of Small Claims Courts which is to provide a simple, informal and inexpensive procedure for the prompt determination of claims within its jurisdiction" (Kilinski v Melendez, 182 Misc 2d 55, 57, 696 NYS2d 780 [Sup Ct, Nassau County 1999], citing UDCA 1802 [the UCCA 1802 counterpart applicable to District Court]). Indeed, these underpinnings of small claims court have been deemed a substantial right to which parties are entitled."
1b) Fordham Rent A Car Corp. v. Hyman, 109 Misc. 2d 176 : "For this court to direct the removal of the small claims action would ignore the intended purpose of the 1979 amendment of subdivision (b) of section 1805 of the New York City Civil Court Act (CCA) which seeks to prevent divestiture of small claims jurisdiction"
1c) Moise v Brown (26 Misc 3d 1224[A], 907 NYS2d 438, 2010 NY Slip Op 50243[U] [Sup Ct, Kings County 2010]) : "Transfer and consolidation here, therefore, would prejudice a substantial right of defendant Keon K. Brown, that is, the right to have his claim resolved according to the standard and rules applicable in the Small Claims Part of Civil Court, whereas allowing the Small Claims action to proceed would not prejudice Plaintiff in this action."
2. I'm not saying the cases don't settle. I'm saying that small claims cases which don't settle almost always go before a judge. They are rarely disposed of by pretrial motions because small claims courts strongly discourage and in some instances prohibit pretrial motions. In CA, for example, a defendant could file a motion to dismiss but that's about it. Other means of disposing cases (e.g. summary judgment) are unavailable.
How would this work for businesses? The owner or CEO gets dragged in? Seems unlikely, otherwise you could just DoS a business by keeping their leadership embroiled in small claims issues.
I imagine you can't have outside counsel represent you, but the business can probably send their own lawyer and delegate authority to them.
When suing a corporation in small claims court in the state of California, an attorney may only be present if they are an officer or director of the corporation and all other officers and directors are attorneys.
The corporation doesn't need to be represented by an officer or director, however, they can also be represented by a non-attorney employee: "a corporation may appear and participate in a small claims action only through a regular employee, or a duly appointed or elected officer or director, who is employed, appointed, or elected for purposes other than solely representing the corporation in small claims court."
Looks like this is a per state thing. If my googling is accurate, this is only true in California, Michigan, and Nebraska. New York, where KitSplit is based, definitely allows a lawyer to represent you in small claims court.
I can’t find an authoritative source right now, but some random legal advise websites mention that some states allow you to sue an out-of-state business in small claims court as long as you are a resident.
I think they send an employee of the company. I don't remember the story but I read someone that was suing one of the big fast food chains and they just kept sending a store manager
Yup. A "legal person" like a corporation in the USA must have legal counsel to represent them in court, even small claims.
Court sucks. Any lawyer will tell you that you don't want the judge making the decision for you. They'll buy you a new camera if they are smart and fix their process.
Otherwise they will spend a lot more on lawyers than they ever would making you whole.
Without personal financial risk, there is no comparison between the two. I've seen up close how unbelievably perilous it can be to risk your personal fortune (sometimes a meager one at that) on an entrepreneurial venture.
Don't kid yourself. If running a business was easy and without downside, everyone would be doing it. Lots of folks try their hand at business only to find out that they don't have the will to ride out the very tough times.
Comparing a person who is trying to build a business on a (possibly) new and unproven innovation to a (likely) tenured professor is worthy of a chuckle.
These are all ad hominem attacks, and invalid on their face. Any member of society has a right to criticize the structure and rules of society. The argument they put forward should be evaluated on its face without regard for who is delivering it, or whether their background, experience, profession, and any other context supports the argument.
Do you know how hard it is to get tenure? You have to work extremely hard for a decade and beat the best. If you don't manage to get tenure then you're left with nothing. In fields like computer science this isn't so bad, because there are good opportunities in industry. But in the arts, pursuing a career in academia means taking a big risk.
I'm not saying that building a business is easy. But neither is building a career in academia. It takes many of the same skills.
I actually do know how hard it is to get tenure. My point still stands.
Very few academics declare bankruptcy when their businesses fail. Very few academics pour their life savings or retirement funds into their academic career only to walk away with less than nothing and owing money they might never be able to repay.
Comparative skills is one thing. Comparative risk is another.
I wrote a snarky and unconstructive reply to you, but though I don't think I was wrong, I deleted it to try to be more constructive.
In this thread, you began by replying to a comment ultimately making the point that the OP commenter brushed off academics unjustifiably. Your reply suggested that the relevant comparison was between a professor whose position is secure and a startup founder in the early throes of trying to gain traction and stability. This was the clear essence of your point -- that somewhere somebody suggested, through such a comparison, that running a business is easy, and that this is wrong.
That comparison is obviously not relevant, especially since the slightly broader context is this article about "capitalist cowboys", i.e. people like James Duke. Duke was born into money and the tobacco business. He did not risk everything for his business. If his cigarette company went completely under, he would not have been destitute. People like Duke are relevant for comparison.
The reference in OP's comment is a common one, to "academics" at large, and is uselessly disparaging. Beyond user "lower"'s point about the skills needed in academia being comparable to those needed for business, we should note that many academics, especially in business schools, have themselves literally been successful in industry and business (read outside of academia). This is a proven way of getting a faculty position at a business school.
I think your point doesn't stand. But you are right that starting and having a business is a nuanced, often risky... business.
The original article used a straw-man to impugn capitalism. That's hardly fair. For every bad faith player there are a thousand farmers (all small businesses IMHO), restaurant owners, inventors, and others who start a business to serve the public with a good or service and are willing to risk their time and money to do it. Lots of those folks don't make it and lose their investment for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it's because of bad management; sometimes the economy; sometimes illegal action by a competitor. Such is life.
In this discussion, we have to be careful of choosing our examples to suit our argument. The original article seems to be blissfully unaware of survivorship bias when she rails against capitalism.
Economics isn't a morality tale. It doesn't care who is "good" or "bad", just who is able to provide something the market needs at a price it's willing to pay.
I know this outrages a lot of people butI would argue that there is more hazard entrusting that determination to government (as the author seems to suggest as a solution) than letting consumers decide for themselves.
I used to use Uber. Now I use Lyft. That was a choice I made when I learned of their management culture. You might care; you might not: it's YOUR choice.
Capitalism isn't the best solution to our scarcity problems but nobody has come up with a better solution yet. Ideas are great but you can't eat ideas. You can't sleep inside of a conjecture.
Capitalism wins because it works in spite of the imperfections in implementation.
To what is Capitalism opposed, here? The original article didn't impugn capitalism, it impugned deregulation, corruption, and a culture of faux-hero worship that reinforces these. It impugned bad capitalism.
It was the opposite of unaware of survivorship bias; the whole point is that such biases (and others) explain why capitalist-cowboy heroes are seen as heroes, instead of actual outstanding acumen and brilliance.
This is part of why I think your original point doesn't stand; you are defending something that wasn't attacked. I care about this mostly because of the framing of the OP, in which capitalism is somehow put in opposition to "academics", which is spurious.
For one thing, this is an article written by a history professor who is pitching her book: " Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism"
The term "corporate imperialism" is your first clue. I spent some more time perusing her other writing and I'm not impressed. She's got an agenda here and that's to take a specific example of corporate power run amok and extend it to other areas. THAT is what I was pushing back against.
There are a litany of other examples that would have served this subject better (oil, sugar, hell, even bananas) because the connection between production of a commodity item and the effect on the economy and society would be much clearer.
In this example, she's focusing on cigarettes as the central player. The problem is that cigarettes aren't a commodity; they're branded. You could easily make the case that Heinz Ketchup doesn't deserve their position as market leader because they control so much of the market that nobody else stands a chance. That kind of backing into a theory of history is what I'm talking about when we discuss survivorship bias. If there hadn't been a monopoly, she'd have nothing to write about. Nothing in the article serves to identify how to prevent a monopoly from forming in the current day nor does she cite any examples of markets where it's nearly impossible (despite their best efforts) for someone to achieve and maintain a monopoly because the pace of innovation constantly forces an evolution of the market.
So, to sum up, I think she's reaching. I don't find her account useful as a prescriptive when trying to understand if monopolies are bad (however they are formed) or if there are ways to prevent a monopoly from forming when a competitor has a product so good that nobody else can come close.
As a book of the history of cigarettes and jazz, sure, whatever.
Capitalism captured by monopolies is not capitalism because there is no competition and thus no real price seeking mechanism. Monopolies have pricing power.
If you love capitalism you should be the strongest advocate against legal structures that allow for the creation of monopolies.
Getting tenure in academia involves going a decade or longer with very minimal savings to begin with, getting paid way below industry standards for the amount of education and experience you have, and not getting tenure in a lot of universities results in you being let go if you were on a tenure-track. I'd rather have the savings to blow on a risky venture that could succeed than the majority of my young adult life be spent underpaid and overworked to get the ability to write grants all day and deal with administrative tasks.
Let's try and understand that this isn't a race to see who has it worse. My point is that an academic in the arts isn't likely to possess the understanding of entrepreneurship and its challenges any more than an entrepreneur is to understand the challenges of a career in academia.
The difference is that one isn't pointing at the other and trying to blame them for all of society's ills.
Plenty of people point at academia and blame them for our problems, and plenty of people think academics are useless to society. I'm personally in the STEM area so I can't really comment on the arts.
I'm not blaming successful people for being successful, I applaud people who build products and create jobs. Thinking outside the box and innovating is great, but when your innovation is in the field of evading the intended consequences of regulations, that's not the kind of success I value.
A tenured professor has already achieved their goal. There's a very real comparison to be made between a startup founder and a young, tenure-track faculty member trying to make their mark on the research community.
You're correct that academics too often dismiss the "soft skills" needed to successfully run a business. But it sounds like you're also dismissing the legitimately hard work that goes into a successful academic career.
I'm not dismissing the hard work that goes into either. What I'm saying is that the risk profile isn't close to being comparable.
A young tenure-track professor isn't at risk of losing their degree if they fail to achieve tenure. It's also unlikely that they might owe thousands (or hundreds of thousands) to the IRS or state tax authorities for which they could very well be personally liable for. That's not a figurative example. I actually saw this happen with a small ISP.
I recall a news story about a congressman who left public service to try and run a business (something not technical) and he was dumbfounded by the practical affect of the laws that he helped pass and how unwieldy and challenging it is for an entrepreneur to actually succeed when faced with the never-ending cascade of regulations and approvals needed to actually open. The gist of the article is that he didn't appreciate the reality of business ownership until he tried it. Then he saw the light.
I would encourage any academic that thinks the only way to succeed in business is to cheat to give it a try themselves. Something as simple as an ice-cream shop can be a real eye-opener in terms of regulatory complexity, financial disclosure, and employment law.
Did NYC "earn" it's first-mover advantage, natural harbor, and particular terrestrial makeup that supports high-rise buildings on the solid granite beneath the feet of every NYC resident?
Did CA "earn" it's fertile central valley, diverse climates great for agriculture and recreation, and miles of gorgeous coastline?
Each wave of residents exploits the resources available to them. No more. No less.
Let's not pretend otherwise. Economics is not a morality tale.
While I'm not going to dispute your larger point, I do want to point out that New York was not originally the shipping capital of the colonies; Philadelphia was. New York City only became the center of trade that it was for so many years after constructing the Erie Canal, allowing trade to easily reach into the Great Lakes and the center of the continent. Many of New York's subsequent advantages (such as the dominance of the NYSE as the various exchanges consolidated) stem from this.
Likewise, California has a great climate for many types of agriculture precisely because it gets so little rain in the Central Valley; farmers can irrigate their crops to the ideal amount water at each point in their lifespan, while farmers elsewhere in the country are subject to the whims of nature. Integral to California's success in agriculture, then, is their investment in irrigation.
Again, I don't mean to dispute your core points, but while it's good to be lucky, investments also compound. California and New York have both historically invested in their economies through massive public works.
I don't see your argument. Texas improved it's economy by digging out the fossil fuels. It's not like they automatically get oil out of a natural spring and just have to fill up their tankers with it.
Building oil pumps doesn't matter if there is no oil to be pumped. Therefore having the economic viability to build oil pumps is a geographic advantage.
Building a canal doesn't matter if it doesn't let you reach the center of the continent. Therefore the economic viability to build a canal is a geographic advantage.
Building an irrigation system doesn't matter if you cannot control the irrigation.
Therefore the economic viability to build a precise irrigation system is a geographic advantage.
Those investments would be completely worthless without the geographic advantage that is needed to optimally use them. Nails don't hammer themselves but without nails there is nothing to hammer. Yet you seem to be focusing on only one of those and implying that someone else's hammer is not a real hammer, they just found the nails already in place in the furniture.
I'm not denying that some states got lucky on natural resources or geography, I'm saying that some states have also invested local resources in developing their economy. They do this by levying taxes on the state and local level and building infrastructure.
SALT deductions incentivize states and localities to do this. They're still incentivizing this, since the deductions were only capped and not eliminated. Do you think states were over-incentivized to invest in their own infrastructure previously?
I've had a 2013 MacBook Air as my main dev machine since new and I just can't bring myself to replace it with a new Mac. Cost wise they are horrendous and those keyboards... ugh. I built a Ryzen PC last year and moved all my dev work to a VM that I SSH into on there.
When this trusty laptop finally gives up I'm totally going that X1 route, my friend here has one and they are so nice.
I recently got a Surface Laptop 2. It's a well designed device and I like the larger screen and slick feel. I like it better compared to the new MacBook Pro at work. Overall,I have gotten quite fond of the Surface Laptop over the last 3 months.
From what I have read, to install Linux / BSD you have to first disable SecureBoot. And even then, many features still don't work. So that makes a Surface a dud for any OS other than Windows.
Everyone knows that AOC was worried about the residents in her district getting priced out and moving away.
It's much less certain she could hold that seat if she was forced to listen to actual middle-class families instead of the low-income group she's representing now.
Leaving aside the fact that different regions of the countries have different levels of comparative living costs and wealth...
The simple fact is that most people ARE middle-class. The bottom income 25-30% of working-age people contribute little to nothing to income-tax receipts. The top 5% in each region have enough assets to live comfortably but carry approximately 70% of the income tax burden. When you get to the top 1%, it's something like 46% of all income-tax receipts IIRC.
So....the folks in the middle carry the burden of the rest of that load.
FWIW, My numbers are approximate but close enough for this discussion. Since tax policy most directly affects people in the middle, it's very important to get it right. Since tax policy for the very rich affects things like investment and business formation, you don't want to tax those income generators to death. For the bottom, you want them to benefit from the programs in place so they can join the ranks of the middle class and pay something back.
But you assertion that nobody (or very few) is middle class anymore I think doesn't align with the facts.
Remember, this is NYC. Compared to Manhattan and Brooklyn, Queens is a distant third in the running.
That’s changing. People priced out of Manhattan and Brooklyn are gentrifying Queens and it’s causing grumbling among long time residents. People see what happened to Brooklyn and don’t want to see rents rise and neighborhoods change. Compared to most other places, most residents are renters in NYC and are exposed to pricing shifts in apartments.
Which district is this? The polls were pretty unanimous that New Yorkers and minorities were happy for Amazon to come along. AOC has her own political agenda which rejects corporate PACS etc. - don't equate that with what people in her district want.
I’m sorry but your comment reeks of SJW orthodoxy.
What I read was a teacher describing her own experience working to try and fix a problem and discovering that nobody else involved has any interest in seeing that problem solved.
Here is my take: none of the historic examples of wrongdoing by this group or that have anything to do with getting educated or embracing a mindset of achievement as opposed to one that will keep them in a state of economic dependency forever.
Ask yourself: what kind of person is more useful to a politician trying to stay in power than one who will always need that politician to secure financial benefits for them? Someone who is capable of standing on their own two feet or someone who believes that the deck is stacked against them?
The one thing I can't understand is why people aren't more excited about the possibility for IBM to completely transform into an open-source-forward organization.
IBM does work for EVERY Fortune 100 company. I can't comment on the working conditions but as a person who regularly works with IBM I can tell you that they aren't much worse than any other 400K employee sized company. There are a lot of folks there that love process and a bunch that are IBM lifers.
Still, the potential to push open-source further into enterprise in a HUGE way, particularly in private cloud, and give a company that might not stomach a strategic relationship with a smaller organization like RedHat.
Please also don't forget that IBM is contributing to open source projects (Istio comes to mind) that align with their strategic direction.
For whatever little is worth, I work for IBM (but I'm still a nice guy, I swear!:), and I'm hyper-excited by this.
[if I were a RedHat employee, I might feel differently... 0:-]
While I work on what HN lovingly refers to as "Enterprise" applications (very legacy, very slow, very 1970s... and yes, very Oracle - PeopleSoft, Weblogic, Tuxedo, Oracle 12g:), there are parts of IBM that are shockingly agile, and have completely embraced open source both internally and as offerings.
I'm a person who looks to the future and hopes that e can find a better way forward. The company has new leaders, new employees, and a new focus on cloud.
There are no losers when a 100-year old Fortune 100 company validates your strategy and values.
I can't take anything in the article seriously when they call Grand Central Terminal by the incorrect "station" name.
Grand Central Terminal is called that because it's the end of the rail lines that arrive there. People who don't know still call it "grand central station".
They only call it Grand Central Station in the headline (and the caption of the title photo) and presumably that's because Grand Central Station is what most people in the world call it.
They call it Grand Central Terminal in the first sentence of of the article.
For large news organizations, it's pretty common for headlines not to be written by the article author and the author to have no control over the headline.
I hate to say it but unless you're bound by an arbitration agreement in the terms of service you should just file in small claims. Even still...file in small claims and make them fight to have the case sent to arbitration. Lawyers are expensive and you won't need one in small claims.
Sometimes the process is the punishment.