12 ms·

The town is no longer friendly for business

135 points by mikeleeorg 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dav-id 15y ago
An absolutely massive issue I am having is getting insurance to trade with the US. As soon as insurers hear I will do 40% of my business with the US they say sorry you are too risky for us to even quote on. I am in the retail industry selling home furnishings and although the US are more friendly (than the UK) with their duty free rate of $200 the legal system is making me consider whether I can even do business there from the UK. It is too big of a risk to take selling physical products to the US when one legal case can take me out of business. If anyone can recommend me a UK based insurer who will even quote on a product importer to the US I would be delighted to know.
- jacquesm 15y ago
  Aren't you a product exporter? Your counterpart in the US would be the importer. As a bit of a counterweight, yes, the US is 'sue happy' but being abroad typically takes a good part of the wind out of the 'I'll see you in court' attitude. It takes a lot more from the litigating party to set up a lawsuit with an overseas party, on top of that the courts in the UK are much less likely to award idiotically high damages. As a first stop, before talking to insurers I think you should talk to a UK based lawyer that has experience defending a UK party from a US party suing them to get a good idea of the lay of the land and the likely hood of such a lawsuit. As soon as you incorporate in the US your chances of being sued will go up enormously, and so will the cost of your defense. In the UK it will be manageable, in the US it will likely put you out of business. As one friend who runs a consumer electronics company said "The US is a very large market and we can not ignore it. But the cost of doing business there in terms of legal hassle is something that we simply pass on to the consumers in the US, which is our way of dealing with it.".
  - dav-id 15y ago
    We ship direct to customers in a way similar to how you might buy from ebay an item from a seller overseas and they will send the item. We want to make the process as easy for our customers as possible so we through our couriers will take care of all customs clearance and duties if they apply. Our biggest advantage of not setting up in the US apart from the legal aspect is being able to avoid a lot of the taxes. When I spoke to the insurers here they told me that should someone in the US sue us it would be in a US court and not a UK court where as you mention the damages are potentially extortionately high! As we are a very young company our exposure to the US is low but it is something that I cant ignore as a risk. Intuitively I would agree that the likelihood of being sued is greatly reduced not being registered in the US but it is a market I would like to grow into. I think seeking advice from a lawyer with experience with US defense is a good advice and I will do this, thanks.
    - jacquesm 15y ago
      Have a read: http://www.wassom.com/personal-jurisdiction-can-my-ar-app-get-me-sued-in-a-foreign-state.html http://www.wassom.com/personal-jurisdiction-can-my-ar-app-ge... I think that contains some information that bears on your situation. My short form advice to you would be: don't worry about lawsuits that you have not been confronted with. It's fine to look ahead but this is something that most likely will never come to pass and you have no control over whether and when it will. Such lawsuits are typically reserved for companies that are wealthy enough to defend against them, a proverb in my country says that 'you can't pluck feathers from a frog' so if you're not a very plump target with assets in the US then you have little to worry about. Concentrate on your product quality, market it with realistic expectations and you'll likely be just fine.
      - lotharbot 15y ago
        > "a proverb in my country says that 'you can't pluck feathers from a frog'" The US version of this proverb is "you can't squeeze blood from a turnip".
    - gregpilling 15y ago
wavephorm 15y ago
The United States is very quickly becoming an ever more scary looking country. From the outside, it appears to be converting itself into a full-on fascist regime, hostile to insiders and outsiders alike. The walls are going up, the spy-cams and wiretapping are springing up. The SOPA/PIPA powered nation-wide firewall is being constructed. Local authorities are increasingly becoming subservient to a centralized federal authority (DHS). And it's all being fueled by propaganda politics, big businesses lobbying, and the rich. The country appears to be going completely crazy.
- shareme 15y ago
  I think you better re-read what is happening in Australia, what you describe better fits their situation than the US one.
  - wavephorm 15y ago
    This trend appears to be happening in Canada, UK, and EU simultaneously. The G8 are coordinating their authoritarian efforts in a way that is completely unprecedented. Like a lot of things the US is probably the one pushing for this on its "friends".
    - mattmanser 15y ago
      I feel things have calmed down in the UK on that front since TB got booted out. Personally I thought the height of that was when David Blunkett was home secretary.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - alan_cx 15y ago
        Who authorised the police to use water cannon and fire arms on protesters in the UK then? Your comment looks like political bias. Both governments ratchet up the attacks on its people. Government is the problem, not which one. I think its about time to realise that the ruling classes see it as us and them. We the people are the enemy of governments. It does not matter which party we are talking about. They farm us like animals. We allow them to.
a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
"My servers are in Germany." The author's granttree is at .co.uk, but woobius is at .com. My understanding is that the US claims domain over anything serving .com and .org, and that first world countries (do we say that anymore?) will roll over for the US on domain issues.
- swombat 15y ago
  I'm not managing the woobius.com domain anymore at this point. swombat.com itself is a dot-com, for sure, and so it is vulnerable to ICE-like shutdown, but not to the level that a GoDaddy domain would be.
- skrebbel 15y ago
  The .com doesn't make random US agencies able to look what's on the servers. Worst case scenario, they could block the domain. Quite a difference, I'd say. This is my reason for never deploying an app on anything that runs on e.g. AWS (thus incl anything on Heroku). It's like personally, directly, with no notification and no warranty, selling out your users to the NSA.
  - swombat 15y ago
    You can get AWS on european servers, and iirc that falls under digital safe harbour laws, so the US govt can't get access to it.
    - joering2 15y ago
      the Dot Com MU shutdown was an international operation with join-forces used from many different countries. What makes you think that if "US govt" wants to access/shut down your domain/servers that are Europe-based, they won't ask their French, UK, German, or any other European country allies for help?
      - skrebbel 15y ago
        Asking an ally for help and simply sending out a "please turn over that data, mr Zuckerberg" is quite a difference. One is top diplomacy, interpol, the whole shebang. The other is something plenty NSA people can do on a whim.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
maeon3 15y ago
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded%26v%3DmII9NZ8MMVM&feature=player_embedded&v=mII9NZ8MMVM&gl=US http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Ffeature%...
powertower 15y ago
I live in the US. I don't know a single person that's in prison. I don't know a single person that's been charged as a terrorist. I don't know a single person whose business has been adversely affected by the government (such as the above). Seriously! But they keep telling me that it's happening all around me. They tell me it's a fascist police state.
- jacquesm 15y ago
  How many people do you know? Do they make up a reasonable cross-section of the US population?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- ht_th 15y ago
  It could be also a form of social segregation you're experiencing. For example, people charged with terrorism acts nowadays are found mainly in extremist religious circles and extremist right wing anti-government circles. (In the 1960s/1970s it would be extremist left-youth and extremist black-emancipation circles) The background of people in prison is often a weak economical-social position coupled with bad childhood experiences or psychological problems. If you do not grow up in these social circles (or you've been out of them for a long time) you just won't interact with people in prison or that are charged as terrorist. That does not mean that these reports aren't exaggerated -- I often wonder about the agenda of these journalists/news outlets--, but it does neither mean you're anecdotal experience is un-biased in measuring the situation.
  - powertower 15y ago
    Where's the evidence that what happened to JotForms was a malicious act designed to shut them down? From what has been made public, it was most likely a blunder. Mistakes and oversights happen. > I often wonder about the agenda of these journalists/news outlets Headlines sell. > That does not mean that these reports aren't exaggerated. Out of the 300 million people living here in the US, half on the edge, I'd say if the sentiment you're trying to protect was even remotely true, every other person would know someone that's been affected by the police state. > but it does neither mean you're anecdotal experience is un-biased in measuring the situation. If my lack of terrorist friends makes me anecdotal, then you've already formed a seriously biased view of the US.
locusm 15y ago
This is knee jerk reaction bullshit. How many domains representing commercial entities are there in the States? How many have been closed down?
- csomar 15y ago
  No, it shouldn't be measured that way.You should measure the damage caused by taking these domains down, and how many comapnies went oit of business because of this.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
There are some general trends that are worth noting. The right seems to generally want to support a new military-industrial complex focused more on immigration and monitoring the population and less on building aircraft carriers. The left seems fine with this, although they'd never openly admit it, aside from a bunch of pundits complaining, as long as they keep and energize their voter base with their issues. The left seems to generally want to support a class warfare us-versus-the-corporations narrative which seeks to make more and more laws about all companies, 10 employees or a 1000. The right seems fine with this, although they'd never openly admit it, aside from a bunch of pundits complaining, as long as they keep and energize their voter base with their issues. The political debate itself seems to be in a spot where the trick is not to get holding the bag. Do only as much as it takes for voters not to blame you. It's much more crisis-driven than it ever has been. These trends don't look well for conducting international business. I don't think there's any disaster coming, but I think the complex social and political systems we've created will actually become less and less stable the more we try to over-manage them. Right now my money is on "friendly for business" but the situation is slowly and inexorably changing for the worse. So if I were a foreigner looking do do a startup, I'd probably be in the states -- and probably would not plan on staying there. (insert long discussion about qualifiers that might change that plan, such as requiring a large, trained workforce or special infrastructure issues.) EDIT: This "instability in complex systems" I brought up is exactly illustrated in the JotForms case. The law over-allocates power to an agency, registrars bend over backward to comply with whatever the agency wants (lest they get on the shit list too.), then some pencil-pusher kills several man-years of work. Not out of malice or evilness -- just by simply not being aware of the implications of her actions. The most frustrating thing is that there are no nazis or evil political parties required here. For the most part it's just good, smart, clever, and responsible people all acting as best they can. That's the real tragedy. It's not some kind of comic book, good-guy-versus-bad-guy situation. It's a bad system created by a bad dynamic, and it looks to get even more bad as that dynamic keeps reinforcing itself.
- ido 15y ago
  So if I were a foreigner looking do do a startup, I'd probably be in the states And how would you get there, assuming you didn't marry an American (H1-B is for employees, not startup founders, in case that was your answer)?
draggnar 15y ago
I wonder if the residents of Easter Island had a similar dialogue before all of the resources on the island were consumed and they started eating each other. If the dialogue is creationist vs. destructionist, what happens when there are no towns left that are friendly for business?
JumpCrisscross 15y ago
An analogy for the subprime mess may be valid here - if you have 10 000 pies and I tell you there is a finger (or arsenic) in 3 of them, even though 99.9% if the pies are clean, you are liable to refuse to eat a random one. Similarly, stating that JotForm is a one in many occurrence fails to account for how that type of regulatory uncertainty poisons the well at the margin (when one is deciding whether to avoid US jurisdiction when setting up web infrastructure).
arohner 15y ago
Ok. Assume for a second the author is right. Now what? Where would we go? I recently moved from Austin, TX, to SF. Austin is a better place to live and work, in terms of business friendliness and cost, but is a significantly worse place to start a startup, due to worse investment climate, and lower critical mass of developers, customers and support group familiar with the startup culture. Even though SF is at the leading edge of the the trends the author describes, it's still a better place to do a startup. I expect that will remain true for a while, even as things get worse.

135 points by mikeleeorg 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

An absolutely massive issue I am having is getting insurance to trade with the US. As soon as insurers hear I will do 40% of my business with the US they say sorry you are too risky for us to even quote on. I am in the retail industry selling home furnishings and although the US are more friendly (than the UK) with their duty free rate of $200 the legal system is making me consider whether I can even do business there from the UK. It is too big of a risk to take selling physical products to the US when one legal case can take me out of business. If anyone can recommend me a UK based insurer who will even quote on a product importer to the US I would be delighted to know.

jacquesm 15y ago
Aren't you a product exporter? Your counterpart in the US would be the importer. As a bit of a counterweight, yes, the US is 'sue happy' but being abroad typically takes a good part of the wind out of the 'I'll see you in court' attitude. It takes a lot more from the litigating party to set up a lawsuit with an overseas party, on top of that the courts in the UK are much less likely to award idiotically high damages. As a first stop, before talking to insurers I think you should talk to a UK based lawyer that has experience defending a UK party from a US party suing them to get a good idea of the lay of the land and the likely hood of such a lawsuit. As soon as you incorporate in the US your chances of being sued will go up enormously, and so will the cost of your defense. In the UK it will be manageable, in the US it will likely put you out of business. As one friend who runs a consumer electronics company said "The US is a very large market and we can not ignore it. But the cost of doing business there in terms of legal hassle is something that we simply pass on to the consumers in the US, which is our way of dealing with it.".
- dav-id 15y ago
  We ship direct to customers in a way similar to how you might buy from ebay an item from a seller overseas and they will send the item. We want to make the process as easy for our customers as possible so we through our couriers will take care of all customs clearance and duties if they apply. Our biggest advantage of not setting up in the US apart from the legal aspect is being able to avoid a lot of the taxes. When I spoke to the insurers here they told me that should someone in the US sue us it would be in a US court and not a UK court where as you mention the damages are potentially extortionately high! As we are a very young company our exposure to the US is low but it is something that I cant ignore as a risk. Intuitively I would agree that the likelihood of being sued is greatly reduced not being registered in the US but it is a market I would like to grow into. I think seeking advice from a lawyer with experience with US defense is a good advice and I will do this, thanks.
  - jacquesm 15y ago
    Have a read: http://www.wassom.com/personal-jurisdiction-can-my-ar-app-get-me-sued-in-a-foreign-state.html http://www.wassom.com/personal-jurisdiction-can-my-ar-app-ge... I think that contains some information that bears on your situation. My short form advice to you would be: don't worry about lawsuits that you have not been confronted with. It's fine to look ahead but this is something that most likely will never come to pass and you have no control over whether and when it will. Such lawsuits are typically reserved for companies that are wealthy enough to defend against them, a proverb in my country says that 'you can't pluck feathers from a frog' so if you're not a very plump target with assets in the US then you have little to worry about. Concentrate on your product quality, market it with realistic expectations and you'll likely be just fine.
    - lotharbot 15y ago
      > "a proverb in my country says that 'you can't pluck feathers from a frog'" The US version of this proverb is "you can't squeeze blood from a turnip".
  - gregpilling 15y ago

wavephorm 15y ago

The United States is very quickly becoming an ever more scary looking country. From the outside, it appears to be converting itself into a full-on fascist regime, hostile to insiders and outsiders alike. The walls are going up, the spy-cams and wiretapping are springing up. The SOPA/PIPA powered nation-wide firewall is being constructed. Local authorities are increasingly becoming subservient to a centralized federal authority (DHS). And it's all being fueled by propaganda politics, big businesses lobbying, and the rich. The country appears to be going completely crazy.

shareme 15y ago
I think you better re-read what is happening in Australia, what you describe better fits their situation than the US one.
- wavephorm 15y ago
  This trend appears to be happening in Canada, UK, and EU simultaneously. The G8 are coordinating their authoritarian efforts in a way that is completely unprecedented. Like a lot of things the US is probably the one pushing for this on its "friends".
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    I feel things have calmed down in the UK on that front since TB got booted out. Personally I thought the height of that was when David Blunkett was home secretary.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - alan_cx 15y ago
      Who authorised the police to use water cannon and fire arms on protesters in the UK then? Your comment looks like political bias. Both governments ratchet up the attacks on its people. Government is the problem, not which one. I think its about time to realise that the ruling classes see it as us and them. We the people are the enemy of governments. It does not matter which party we are talking about. They farm us like animals. We allow them to.

a_a_r_o_n 15y ago

"My servers are in Germany." The author's granttree is at .co.uk, but woobius is at .com. My understanding is that the US claims domain over anything serving .com and .org, and that first world countries (do we say that anymore?) will roll over for the US on domain issues.

swombat 15y ago
I'm not managing the woobius.com domain anymore at this point. swombat.com itself is a dot-com, for sure, and so it is vulnerable to ICE-like shutdown, but not to the level that a GoDaddy domain would be.
skrebbel 15y ago
The .com doesn't make random US agencies able to look what's on the servers. Worst case scenario, they could block the domain. Quite a difference, I'd say. This is my reason for never deploying an app on anything that runs on e.g. AWS (thus incl anything on Heroku). It's like personally, directly, with no notification and no warranty, selling out your users to the NSA.
- swombat 15y ago
  You can get AWS on european servers, and iirc that falls under digital safe harbour laws, so the US govt can't get access to it.
  - joering2 15y ago
    the Dot Com MU shutdown was an international operation with join-forces used from many different countries. What makes you think that if "US govt" wants to access/shut down your domain/servers that are Europe-based, they won't ask their French, UK, German, or any other European country allies for help?
    - skrebbel 15y ago
      Asking an ally for help and simply sending out a "please turn over that data, mr Zuckerberg" is quite a difference. One is top diplomacy, interpol, the whole shebang. The other is something plenty NSA people can do on a whim.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

maeon3 15y ago

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded%26v%3DmII9NZ8MMVM&feature=player_embedded&v=mII9NZ8MMVM&gl=US http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Ffeature%...

powertower 15y ago

I live in the US. I don't know a single person that's in prison. I don't know a single person that's been charged as a terrorist. I don't know a single person whose business has been adversely affected by the government (such as the above). Seriously! But they keep telling me that it's happening all around me. They tell me it's a fascist police state.

jacquesm 15y ago
How many people do you know? Do they make up a reasonable cross-section of the US population?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ht_th 15y ago
It could be also a form of social segregation you're experiencing. For example, people charged with terrorism acts nowadays are found mainly in extremist religious circles and extremist right wing anti-government circles. (In the 1960s/1970s it would be extremist left-youth and extremist black-emancipation circles) The background of people in prison is often a weak economical-social position coupled with bad childhood experiences or psychological problems. If you do not grow up in these social circles (or you've been out of them for a long time) you just won't interact with people in prison or that are charged as terrorist. That does not mean that these reports aren't exaggerated -- I often wonder about the agenda of these journalists/news outlets--, but it does neither mean you're anecdotal experience is un-biased in measuring the situation.
- powertower 15y ago
  Where's the evidence that what happened to JotForms was a malicious act designed to shut them down? From what has been made public, it was most likely a blunder. Mistakes and oversights happen. > I often wonder about the agenda of these journalists/news outlets Headlines sell. > That does not mean that these reports aren't exaggerated. Out of the 300 million people living here in the US, half on the edge, I'd say if the sentiment you're trying to protect was even remotely true, every other person would know someone that's been affected by the police state. > but it does neither mean you're anecdotal experience is un-biased in measuring the situation. If my lack of terrorist friends makes me anecdotal, then you've already formed a seriously biased view of the US.

locusm 15y ago

This is knee jerk reaction bullshit. How many domains representing commercial entities are there in the States? How many have been closed down?

csomar 15y ago
No, it shouldn't be measured that way.You should measure the damage caused by taking these domains down, and how many comapnies went oit of business because of this.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

There are some general trends that are worth noting. The right seems to generally want to support a new military-industrial complex focused more on immigration and monitoring the population and less on building aircraft carriers. The left seems fine with this, although they'd never openly admit it, aside from a bunch of pundits complaining, as long as they keep and energize their voter base with their issues. The left seems to generally want to support a class warfare us-versus-the-corporations narrative which seeks to make more and more laws about all companies, 10 employees or a 1000. The right seems fine with this, although they'd never openly admit it, aside from a bunch of pundits complaining, as long as they keep and energize their voter base with their issues. The political debate itself seems to be in a spot where the trick is not to get holding the bag. Do only as much as it takes for voters not to blame you. It's much more crisis-driven than it ever has been. These trends don't look well for conducting international business. I don't think there's any disaster coming, but I think the complex social and political systems we've created will actually become less and less stable the more we try to over-manage them. Right now my money is on "friendly for business" but the situation is slowly and inexorably changing for the worse. So if I were a foreigner looking do do a startup, I'd probably be in the states -- and probably would not plan on staying there. (insert long discussion about qualifiers that might change that plan, such as requiring a large, trained workforce or special infrastructure issues.) EDIT: This "instability in complex systems" I brought up is exactly illustrated in the JotForms case. The law over-allocates power to an agency, registrars bend over backward to comply with whatever the agency wants (lest they get on the shit list too.), then some pencil-pusher kills several man-years of work. Not out of malice or evilness -- just by simply not being aware of the implications of her actions. The most frustrating thing is that there are no nazis or evil political parties required here. For the most part it's just good, smart, clever, and responsible people all acting as best they can. That's the real tragedy. It's not some kind of comic book, good-guy-versus-bad-guy situation. It's a bad system created by a bad dynamic, and it looks to get even more bad as that dynamic keeps reinforcing itself.

ido 15y ago
So if I were a foreigner looking do do a startup, I'd probably be in the states And how would you get there, assuming you didn't marry an American (H1-B is for employees, not startup founders, in case that was your answer)?

draggnar 15y ago

I wonder if the residents of Easter Island had a similar dialogue before all of the resources on the island were consumed and they started eating each other. If the dialogue is creationist vs. destructionist, what happens when there are no towns left that are friendly for business?

JumpCrisscross 15y ago

An analogy for the subprime mess may be valid here - if you have 10 000 pies and I tell you there is a finger (or arsenic) in 3 of them, even though 99.9% if the pies are clean, you are liable to refuse to eat a random one. Similarly, stating that JotForm is a one in many occurrence fails to account for how that type of regulatory uncertainty poisons the well at the margin (when one is deciding whether to avoid US jurisdiction when setting up web infrastructure).

arohner 15y ago

Ok. Assume for a second the author is right. Now what? Where would we go? I recently moved from Austin, TX, to SF. Austin is a better place to live and work, in terms of business friendliness and cost, but is a significantly worse place to start a startup, due to worse investment climate, and lower critical mass of developers, customers and support group familiar with the startup culture. Even though SF is at the leading edge of the the trends the author describes, it's still a better place to do a startup. I expect that will remain true for a while, even as things get worse.