this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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I never said it was similar to phishing. Read my comment again. I was clearly referring to the impact of stigmatisation on the victim. Phishing and phone scam victims also often feel an extreme burden of guilt because they believe they acted stupidly in blindly trusting a link or a person who cold called them. Reinforcing this guilt by telling them "yes you are stupid and you fucked up" doesn't help them. It has the exact opposite effect.
I don't know why you keep trying to frame this as "they started their business and instantly made a mistake because they can't/didn't read". The article is about small business owners being taken advantage during periods of severe financial stress. We are not discussing happy people fucking up due to some innate character flaw. We are talking about people who are suffering from extreme stress and making irrational decisions as a result. Lecturing them as if they didn't sign these contracts as an absolute last resort, in exceptional circumstances is not helpful in any way.
No, we are not talking about people at all. We are talking about companies. Again, if we were talking about people, I would agree with you 100%, but we're not. This is one company making a contract with a different company. Companies are legally distinct from people for very good reasons, and this is one of them.
Of course, there are reallife human behind those companies. And if those people had made these choices as individual people, they would in fact be protected under the law. But they chose NOT to be protected under those laws so they could operate as a company with the ups and down that entails. They voluntarily took this risk to get the benefits of running a company, and now they are crying that they didn't know any better. It doesn't work like that, if you don't want to be treated as a company, don't be one. You don't get to have all the advantages on one hand, and none of the disadvantages on the other.
I want to re-emphasize this: You can absolutely do this work as a private individual. Mia Li, the window-frame importor from the article could have done all her business as a private individual, but she obviously didn't, probably because that comes with some big downsides in taxes. She voluntarily started a company, chosing the waive the very protections she had as a private person, in order to get benefits in the form of tax advantages and other things. And now that she suffers the downsides from her own choises (that choice of starting a business, that she made well before covid), she's upset that she's not shielded from the consequences of her actions like a regular consumer would be.
I don't feel sorry for people when they their voluntary, intentionally risky, actions have consequences.
Cool, but wouldn’t it be better if scummy practices weren’t allowed at all? That’s the society I’d rather live in, not the one where we rag on people for being “stupid”. Company or not, there’s simply not enough general education on running a business and I feel that this is really a barrier for those who want to run a business and live the capitalist dream. i.e. she could probably have operated as an individual, but maybe didn’t know any better or maybe she can’t because of some other arrangements. I think it’s hard to say they should know when they might not have the money or access to education, though I haven’t read the article myself so who knows, but I’m just considering the general case here.
Good luck preventing all scummy practices.
Not that we shouldn't try, but to expect them to not exist is naive.
I'm sure we could have legislation made about contracts which are human readable, no "fine print", not obtusely long using legal jargon