8 ms·

Let's extrapolate: What if you were thrown out of your apartment if you failed to pay rent, the hospital would make the pacemaker stop working if you didn't pay

by flexie 13y ago

Let's extrapolate: What if you were thrown out of your apartment if you failed to pay rent, the hospital would make the pacemaker stop working if you didn't pay your bills. Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee. Guys would show up to collect the TV you had failed to pay for. Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes etc. etc, all without the creditor having to go to court first. Oh, and everything would be posted on Facebook, Linkedin etc for your friends to see. Stopping services and naming and shaming clients who don't / can't pay is a slippery slope and not always civilized. Be happy not all creditors act this way.

glesica 13y ago
Wait, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because just about all those things that you mentioned actually do happen. You DO get evicted if you fail to pay rent. The hospital won't make the pacemaker stop working, but they'll refuse further treatment that might be necessary. The lawyer wouldn't tell all your secrets, but might be asked to help track you down. Repo men DO come and collect your TV if you don't pay for it. Your citizenship won't be revoked if you don't pay your taxes, but you can go to prison, thus having your liberty (arguably the most important part of citizenship) revoked. And most of these things happen in public, for everyone to see.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- lambda 13y ago
  Note that eviction requires the landlord to go to court, not just unilateral action on the part of the landlord. Somehow I doubt this web designer got a court order to allow them to deface their client's page. Hospitals will not refuse treatment that is necessary to provide life support. Collections agencies generally operate by sending you mail and calling your phone repeatedly until they get their payment. The contents of your mail and phone calls are generally private. Note that most of these are private matters, generally considered confidential.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    > Hospitals will not refuse treatment that is necessary to provide life support. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22357873/ns/health-health_care/t/family-sues-insurer-who-denied-teen-transplant/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22357873/ns/health-health_care/t/f...
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      That's not the same thing, now is it?
- flexie 13y ago
  Not without going through court and that's the whole point.
jtreminio 13y ago
> Guys would show up to collect the TV you had failed to pay for. This happens all the time, it's called a repossession.
- flexie 13y ago
  Different jurisdictions, different rules and names. In general, jurisdictions that allow repossession without going to court, requires the creditor to follow strict procedures with reminders etc, and usually it's also a requirement that the actual act of taking possession is handled by public bailiffs or at least repossession agents (that act under strict liability). It's not just some dude from Best Buy who drops by when it suits him, puts a sign on your front lawn that says you haven't paid him, kicks the door in and takes back the TV.
tga 13y ago
You definitely get thrown out of a rented apartment if you don't pay your rent and if you finance your electronics and fail to pay they will eventually repo your goods. As for hospitals (in the US), they don't even talk to you about replacing your failing pacemaker before proof of insurance that will pay.
RyanZAG 13y ago
thrown out of your apartment if you failed to pay rent This doesn't happen? I'm pretty sure it does. Try renting an apartment in a decent area and then never paying the rent. Let me know how long you're able to stay there. the hospital would make the pacemaker stop working The hospital will never install a pacemaker if you don't pay in full up front or have medical insurance that will guarantee payment. They'll happily watch you die in the ward if you can't pay. Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee Don't know enough about the payment of lawyers to comment here, but I'm pretty sure not paying your lawyer is a particularly bad mistake to make. Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes You get to keep your citizenship, but they will happily take your freedom and put you in jail. I think I'd rather lose my citizenship to be honest. I don't understand your examples. Having your website go down if you don't pay the guy who made it sounds pretty normal. I have a friend who installs burglar bars on windows - if you don't pay him, he will come to your house with a crowbar and take those burglar bars back regardless of how much of your house he has to break to do it. He still has plenty of customers, since it's standard practice in that industry to take back the burglar bars. They argue (successfully, it seems) that the bars are still their property until you pay them.
smalltalk 13y ago
Try not paying for any of those things and see how it goes.
harel 13y ago
Sorry, but a website is still classified as non essential to sustain life or we'll being. It can even be considered by some as luxury. And Web designers are many times shafted in that process. Good move on his part. Hope he gets paid.
nknighthb 13y ago
Others have mostly covered your myriad errors, but: > Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes Per US Supreme Court decisions going back decades, citizenship cannot be "revoked" from a natural-born US citizen under any circumstances, and may only be removed from a naturalized citizen in case of fraud during the naturalization process. Failure to pay taxes is a criminal offense, not a grounds for loss of citizenship. And: > Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee. Attorney/client privilege attaches the moment you begin speaking to an attorney as a client or prospective client. It is not dissolved by failure to pay. It is not dissolved by anything except, sometimes, death of the client (and courts are inconsistent on that one). An attorney who did what you described would be disbarred, and the "evidence" would be inadmissible in court.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  The parent comment wasn't an assertion these things happen, it was a "what if these things did happen?" (and, in particular, without going to court first).
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    To be meaningful, "what ifs" must be based on scenarios that are somehow comparable. The two I called out implicate not property rights, but fundamental constitutional rights.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      That's not an absurd objection, but you should have made it clearer. All I got from your comment was an assertion that these things weren't the case, and of course they're not the case - that was the point of the preceding comment.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  I was in my atty's office last week. A secretary was trying to make arrangements for an apparently frantic client who needed an atty to represent him in front of a judge (request a continuance, I think). The client had 'payment problems' and not a single atty in the office could find the time to rep' him. In other words, your atty will leave you to swing in the wind.
mikeash 13y ago
Let's extrapolate in the opposite direction: what if you could keep living in a place without paying for it, never pay medical bills, never pay your lawyer, never pay for your TV, never pay your taxes, etc.? I'm pretty sure that society as we know it would collapse.
- balloot 13y ago
  What's your point? Nobody here is arguing that the client should be able to not pay for services rendered.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    The post I'm replying to is basically saying, imagine a world where people deny you things if you don't pay for them. I'm just pointing out what the world would be like if that wasn't true.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      No, the parent was saying imagine a world where those things were denied by unilateral decision without judicial mediation.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        That's already the world we live in for many things, including some of his examples (e.g. TVs being repossessed), so, I don't see why that matters much.
        dllthomas 13y ago
        I think it quite clearly makes a tremendous difference. TVs being repossessed was an erroneous example, yes, but I don't think that presents a significant problem with the point - this was a step beyond simple repossession.
        13y ago
Justsignedup 13y ago
Let's make a better example: You drive in to your car mechanic. You get a full on paint job, new windows, new wheels, new axles, the works. The car is shiny and new. You come into the mechanic's garrage and say "can i have my car please" the mechanic says "your bill is XXXXXX". You respond with "nono i just need my cara, I'll pay you later... And then when the mechanic doesn't return the car you complain "WHAT AN UNPROFESSIONAL JERK! PART OF DOING BUSINESS IS WAITING FOR ME TO PAY HIM!" Analogy to health care: A poor man with no money to spare is stabbed by a rusty nail. He will get an infection and die unless he gets massive antibiotics. The hospital turns him down. The reason we made LAWS preventing hospitals from doing this is because our healthcare is a piece of fucking shit. Most other countries the hospital would get paid in full by the government. Because health care != web design or car repairs!
- balloot 13y ago
  Why are you assuming the client didn't pay? You know absolutely nothing except that the designer ripped down the website and replaced it with a nastygram. Given that information, I'm certainly not quick to rule out the possibility that designer may be the asshole here. Or in your mechanic example, maybe that mechanic quoted me $500, and then I show up and he asks for $1500 instead. I don't want to pay $1000 extra, so he threatens to spray paint my car with "balloot is a cheapskate" and park it out front of his shop. How do you have any idea this isn't what onemine.com isn't doing to the grocery store?
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    "The client didn't pay" is the basic assumption necessary for most of this conversation to make any sense. If you want to discuss whether or not this particular client really did or did not pay, that's fine, but don't chastise others for having a different conversation than you are.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      I love how often this kind of thing pops up in discussions like these. "Maybe he's lying!" Sure. But you don't get to just pick an arbitrary lie out of thin air that supports whatever point you'd like to make. If you think somebody is unreliable, then you need to remove their testimony from your pool of facts and re-evaluate. If that testimony is the only source of facts for the subject at hand, then you no longer have anything to talk about. You cannot both simultaneously say we can't believe this guy and carry out any kind of commentary on the event, unless you've discovered some other info on it and haven't told anyone else about it.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
> naming and shaming clients who don't / can't pay See also, credit histories. Shit does happen in the normal course of business and financial issues can (and do!) happen to most people, but people (and companies) are generally forgiving of good faith efforts to make things right. It seems in this case that the client was a genuinely bad client that made no effort to pay the designer. Most designers don't want to risk their reputations over trivial shit and will only pull a stunt like this with an egregious button pusher client.
awda 13y ago
Let's draw a line between businesses and human beings. Your business SHOULD be thrown out for not paying rent. Your business SHOULD be fined, dissolved, or bankrupted if it doesn't pay taxes. A business going bankrupt because they don't pay their debts is not a tragedy.

by flexie 13y ago

glesica 13y ago

Wait, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because just about all those things that you mentioned actually do happen. You DO get evicted if you fail to pay rent. The hospital won't make the pacemaker stop working, but they'll refuse further treatment that might be necessary. The lawyer wouldn't tell all your secrets, but might be asked to help track you down. Repo men DO come and collect your TV if you don't pay for it. Your citizenship won't be revoked if you don't pay your taxes, but you can go to prison, thus having your liberty (arguably the most important part of citizenship) revoked. And most of these things happen in public, for everyone to see.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lambda 13y ago
Note that eviction requires the landlord to go to court, not just unilateral action on the part of the landlord. Somehow I doubt this web designer got a court order to allow them to deface their client's page. Hospitals will not refuse treatment that is necessary to provide life support. Collections agencies generally operate by sending you mail and calling your phone repeatedly until they get their payment. The contents of your mail and phone calls are generally private. Note that most of these are private matters, generally considered confidential.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  > Hospitals will not refuse treatment that is necessary to provide life support. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22357873/ns/health-health_care/t/family-sues-insurer-who-denied-teen-transplant/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22357873/ns/health-health_care/t/f...
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    That's not the same thing, now is it?
flexie 13y ago
Not without going through court and that's the whole point.

jtreminio 13y ago

> Guys would show up to collect the TV you had failed to pay for. This happens all the time, it's called a repossession.

flexie 13y ago
Different jurisdictions, different rules and names. In general, jurisdictions that allow repossession without going to court, requires the creditor to follow strict procedures with reminders etc, and usually it's also a requirement that the actual act of taking possession is handled by public bailiffs or at least repossession agents (that act under strict liability). It's not just some dude from Best Buy who drops by when it suits him, puts a sign on your front lawn that says you haven't paid him, kicks the door in and takes back the TV.

tga 13y ago

You definitely get thrown out of a rented apartment if you don't pay your rent and if you finance your electronics and fail to pay they will eventually repo your goods. As for hospitals (in the US), they don't even talk to you about replacing your failing pacemaker before proof of insurance that will pay.

RyanZAG 13y ago

thrown out of your apartment if you failed to pay rent This doesn't happen? I'm pretty sure it does. Try renting an apartment in a decent area and then never paying the rent. Let me know how long you're able to stay there. the hospital would make the pacemaker stop working The hospital will never install a pacemaker if you don't pay in full up front or have medical insurance that will guarantee payment. They'll happily watch you die in the ward if you can't pay. Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee Don't know enough about the payment of lawyers to comment here, but I'm pretty sure not paying your lawyer is a particularly bad mistake to make. Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes You get to keep your citizenship, but they will happily take your freedom and put you in jail. I think I'd rather lose my citizenship to be honest. I don't understand your examples. Having your website go down if you don't pay the guy who made it sounds pretty normal. I have a friend who installs burglar bars on windows - if you don't pay him, he will come to your house with a crowbar and take those burglar bars back regardless of how much of your house he has to break to do it. He still has plenty of customers, since it's standard practice in that industry to take back the burglar bars. They argue (successfully, it seems) that the bars are still their property until you pay them.

smalltalk 13y ago

Try not paying for any of those things and see how it goes.

harel 13y ago

Sorry, but a website is still classified as non essential to sustain life or we'll being. It can even be considered by some as luxury. And Web designers are many times shafted in that process. Good move on his part. Hope he gets paid.

nknighthb 13y ago

Others have mostly covered your myriad errors, but: > Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes Per US Supreme Court decisions going back decades, citizenship cannot be "revoked" from a natural-born US citizen under any circumstances, and may only be removed from a naturalized citizen in case of fraud during the naturalization process. Failure to pay taxes is a criminal offense, not a grounds for loss of citizenship. And: > Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee. Attorney/client privilege attaches the moment you begin speaking to an attorney as a client or prospective client. It is not dissolved by failure to pay. It is not dissolved by anything except, sometimes, death of the client (and courts are inconsistent on that one). An attorney who did what you described would be disbarred, and the "evidence" would be inadmissible in court.

dllthomas 13y ago
The parent comment wasn't an assertion these things happen, it was a "what if these things did happen?" (and, in particular, without going to court first).
- nknighthb 13y ago
  To be meaningful, "what ifs" must be based on scenarios that are somehow comparable. The two I called out implicate not property rights, but fundamental constitutional rights.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    That's not an absurd objection, but you should have made it clearer. All I got from your comment was an assertion that these things weren't the case, and of course they're not the case - that was the point of the preceding comment.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I was in my atty's office last week. A secretary was trying to make arrangements for an apparently frantic client who needed an atty to represent him in front of a judge (request a continuance, I think). The client had 'payment problems' and not a single atty in the office could find the time to rep' him. In other words, your atty will leave you to swing in the wind.

mikeash 13y ago

Let's extrapolate in the opposite direction: what if you could keep living in a place without paying for it, never pay medical bills, never pay your lawyer, never pay for your TV, never pay your taxes, etc.? I'm pretty sure that society as we know it would collapse.

balloot 13y ago
What's your point? Nobody here is arguing that the client should be able to not pay for services rendered.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The post I'm replying to is basically saying, imagine a world where people deny you things if you don't pay for them. I'm just pointing out what the world would be like if that wasn't true.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    No, the parent was saying imagine a world where those things were denied by unilateral decision without judicial mediation.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      That's already the world we live in for many things, including some of his examples (e.g. TVs being repossessed), so, I don't see why that matters much.
      - dllthomas 13y ago
        I think it quite clearly makes a tremendous difference. TVs being repossessed was an erroneous example, yes, but I don't think that presents a significant problem with the point - this was a step beyond simple repossession.
        13y ago

Justsignedup 13y ago

Let's make a better example: You drive in to your car mechanic. You get a full on paint job, new windows, new wheels, new axles, the works. The car is shiny and new. You come into the mechanic's garrage and say "can i have my car please" the mechanic says "your bill is XXXXXX". You respond with "nono i just need my cara, I'll pay you later... And then when the mechanic doesn't return the car you complain "WHAT AN UNPROFESSIONAL JERK! PART OF DOING BUSINESS IS WAITING FOR ME TO PAY HIM!" Analogy to health care: A poor man with no money to spare is stabbed by a rusty nail. He will get an infection and die unless he gets massive antibiotics. The hospital turns him down. The reason we made LAWS preventing hospitals from doing this is because our healthcare is a piece of fucking shit. Most other countries the hospital would get paid in full by the government. Because health care != web design or car repairs!

balloot 13y ago
Why are you assuming the client didn't pay? You know absolutely nothing except that the designer ripped down the website and replaced it with a nastygram. Given that information, I'm certainly not quick to rule out the possibility that designer may be the asshole here. Or in your mechanic example, maybe that mechanic quoted me $500, and then I show up and he asks for $1500 instead. I don't want to pay $1000 extra, so he threatens to spray paint my car with "balloot is a cheapskate" and park it out front of his shop. How do you have any idea this isn't what onemine.com isn't doing to the grocery store?
- nknighthb 13y ago
  "The client didn't pay" is the basic assumption necessary for most of this conversation to make any sense. If you want to discuss whether or not this particular client really did or did not pay, that's fine, but don't chastise others for having a different conversation than you are.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    I love how often this kind of thing pops up in discussions like these. "Maybe he's lying!" Sure. But you don't get to just pick an arbitrary lie out of thin air that supports whatever point you'd like to make. If you think somebody is unreliable, then you need to remove their testimony from your pool of facts and re-evaluate. If that testimony is the only source of facts for the subject at hand, then you no longer have anything to talk about. You cannot both simultaneously say we can't believe this guy and carry out any kind of commentary on the event, unless you've discovered some other info on it and haven't told anyone else about it.

kintamanimatt 13y ago

> naming and shaming clients who don't / can't pay See also, credit histories. Shit does happen in the normal course of business and financial issues can (and do!) happen to most people, but people (and companies) are generally forgiving of good faith efforts to make things right. It seems in this case that the client was a genuinely bad client that made no effort to pay the designer. Most designers don't want to risk their reputations over trivial shit and will only pull a stunt like this with an egregious button pusher client.

awda 13y ago

Let's draw a line between businesses and human beings. Your business SHOULD be thrown out for not paying rent. Your business SHOULD be fined, dissolved, or bankrupted if it doesn't pay taxes. A business going bankrupt because they don't pay their debts is not a tragedy.