I’m having a similar problem. Spent way too much time on the internet starting in my preteens and it shaped the way I write - which not surprisingly - is a similar way to how an AI - trained on the online data - writes
Is this really true? I'm in the US, and have a corporation in the US. I am shielded from liability through the corporate veil, but I also have a $50/mo $2M/incidence liability umbrella. I honestly have no idea if either are necessary, in 20 years of "doing business" I've never had a single liability needing to be covered by insurance or the veil.
I think it's wise to have, just in case, but even in lawsuit happy America where I have had to fire multiple clients mid-project due to various reason. I've never had blowback or even the treat of a suit. We all just went our separate ways.
Lawsuits are more common in Germany than the US. Possibly because the procedure is different, with lower overhead, and penalties are not reduced for reasons like: you don't have the money to pay.
I believe Germany is generally heavy on liability and light on ways to avoid it. If you damage someone's property, there may be a procedure to confirm that you damaged their property, and then you must pay the value of the damage - as well as the court fee because you didn't just pay it upon asking. No ifs or buts. You cannot avoid paying it in any way, including the clever use of paperwork to avoid paying it. That's why there's a high bar to form a GmbH. As you correctly pointed out, good insurance can also limit your effective liability. I think such business liability insurance products are very common in Germany.
After reading that, for all the talk the USA has about "personal responsibility", it doesn't seem that serious about it, does it?
I haven't been sued either, and I live in Germany. I did pay someone $100 to replace something I accidentally broke, and walked away with the broken thing. No court was involved there and I didn't bother to claim insurance.
Limited liability is something you should always want, and if it merely costs a $30 filing fee and some forms, you should get it, but it's obviously jurisdiction-specific and in Germany, with the much higher requirements, it's obvious that they really only want medium to large businesses to have it (though this isn't a direct rule, I think).
From this thread I just learned about the Unternehmergesellschaft (haftungsbeschränkt) which is apparently a GmbH that can be formed for less than $25,000, but instead, you have to set aside 25% of your profit until you have $25,000, at which point you can convert to a normal GmbH.
> I've never had a single liability needing to be covered by insurance or the veil.
That’s how insurance works. You don’t need it often and maybe not even your entire life, but if it happens and you aren’t covered it will ruin your life.
If this description is not accurate for the situation then you probably don’t need insurance.
I'll warn you that insurance companies often try not to cover a loss or all of it. They often try to cheat their customers. So, having insurance isnt equal to a structure that makes you personally immune to liability because what the insurance company will do is unknown.
And I'll warn you a limited liability entity doesn't necessarily protect your personal assets either.
Undercapitalization is a big one that people don't often realize - going without insurance an not enough funds to cover a claim will usually pierce the veil.
Same goes with little things that typically don't matter to the owner of a one person company, like failing to keep board/member annual meeting minutes and sending them to the state body that requires them, and the biggest one for most small businesses - commingling funds and "alter ego" doctrine - the company is not you, the company's money is not yours.
There are a lot of ways that limited liabilities vanish - especially for smaller businesses like OP is describing.
Physical buttons are the reason why I bought A4 B9. I had the opportunity to drive A6 and Model 3, but I couldn’t understand why most of the controls were screens.
After driving a couple hundred thousand miles and knowing that at least in Germany you are not allowed to use your smartphone while driving (isn’t that just a screen?!) I’m slowly starting to think that we may have reached the top with interior car tech.
I can't begin to tell you how bad and annoying the software is in my 2015 Honda Odyssey.
Honda... I'm at about 98% of the straws of the camel's back on deciding why I should never contribute to Honda's business as a customer, ever again.
It's as though Honda never tested this vehicle nor drove it for a few days. Nor drove it until things started breaking and software made stupid decisions.
- Sliding door doesn't work? Oh! Guess what-- Now you can't open the gas cap because the software can't communicate with the sliding door! Yay! We'll just take extra special care not to let our software let you open the gas cap... we don't want that non-responsive sliding door to accidentally hit it. And you, customer? You're too dumb to do that on your own, we'll be your nanny.
- Oh, you installed a rear cargo trailer? Sorry! You'll just have to endure the loud constant warning-beep on reverse! And no-- we'll provide no way of turning that off :) Because we care so much about your convenience and comfort. And no-- Don't expect us to ever expect you might install anything our rear view camera warning-beep-system might detect, on your back trailer hitch. No one ever installs things on the rear side of the vehicle, duh! ...The customer is stupid, Not us, the car manufacturer! We'll make extra special care to be extremely stupid to ensure you can never be quite as stupid as extremely stupid!
Perhaps they discovered all the bugs and threw their hands up because of operations/finance/sales/marketing deadlines, and said "Haha... screw it. Just sell it. To hell with the customer!"
The one which got me was when I took our elderly Subaru in to the dealer for a combination of recall and maintenance work a few years back. They gave me a loaner which normally works as a sales encouragement but in my case the experience was terrible. CarPlay should have been an easy sell - the one we own lacks it - but that meant using a slow touchscreen to close a dialog every time you start the vehicle, and then it crashed because the 10k tracks in my music collection is apparently more than the designer ever considered possible, which meant another modal dialog to dismiss before actually using anything. When I dropped the loaner off two days later, it was such an implausible relief to go back to a vehicle with fewer features but 100% of them working reliably and instantly.
This is still somehow better than the Microsoft mess Ford shipped in the same era where it would crash and reboot, so I could only pair it using Bluetooth.
My 2021 Toyota has a screen and I hate it so much.
- When I start the car it takes a minute for the software to boot so radio and stuff is unresponsive
- I get a popup warning to obey the laws and drive safely that stays up for 30 seconds. Why in the hell do I need a reminder for this?
- If its cold enough it warns be to drive slowly because the roads could be icy... yes I know Its 30 degrees out, I didn't need this warning.
I’m confused. Is this supposed to be a startup landscape or tool landscape? If the latter then I’d include cloud providers, BigQuery and compute providers.
It’s surprising to me that not only in my home country is the process of having a CPAP machine covered by insurance a long and complicated one.
In my case, it took almost 12 months to receive my first CPAP machine, which then turned out to be refurbished. Initially, I had to visit a doctor, who had an available appointment in two months. He then referred me to a sleep laboratory (another two-month wait). After my sleep study, they sent me back to the doctor, who confirmed I had sleep apnea and said I needed to return to the sleep lab to test some settings—a further two months’ wait.
Then, after more than a month waiting for the next appointment, the doctor informed me that the settings they had tried were too low and wanted to send me back to the lab. I disagreed, but he gave me the prescription, and two months later, I received a CPAP machine with incorrect settings that didn’t help much.
Eventually, I purchased my own Philips Dreamstation Go because it automatically adjusts the pressure, and I’ve been sleeping well ever since.
After an initial round of bullshit with the local government insurance agency to get my CPAP including the multiple “two month wait for x”, then a 6 month wait to get the machine, and subsequently struggling to get it serviced, I bought my own for a few hundred EUR and been doing that for nearly 10 years now.
I don’t have much in the way of
“Means”, I just enjoy breathing and set my priorities accordingly. Also, where I live the most expensive CPAP costs like 1800 EUR. Mine costs 900 EUR
Just in case you missed the news about the recall and issues with Philips CPAP machines. You might want to check if there is anything that you can or need to do. The disintegrating foam seems like an unpleasant flaw in production.
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