Nominees: The fastest legal way to lose your company | Hacker News Reader

Nominees: The fastest legal way to lose your company

johnnydoe.is

17 pointsceo-eu14 comments

I just don’t believe that people should be allowed to benefit from limited liability if they aren’t willing to share ownership information and addresses of service if the corporate veil needs to be pierced. I get that people deserve privacy of their home addresses and similar but I feel the public benefit of being able to hold people accountable for their actions is very important. You need to know who you’re entitled to sue if you have a cause of action.

I think some reasonable efforts at asset protection are reasonable, but a lot of the crazy advice that lawyers who specialize in asset protection give is terrible and impractically complex.

You really have to have a reality check when you go beyond the basics of using an LLC and structuring ownership and loans to make it very difficult to sue your company and make sure that these will really work in practice and not end with you being held in jail for contempt until you release the information.

There really needs to be more ways to create anonymous companies to avoid scams like this. It's scary to dox yourself if you want to start a company. Anyone can find your home address if they know the name of your company.

Not everyone wants to be swatted in exchange for the legal protections and funding opportunities granted by forming a business creates.

I don't think anonymous companies make sense ethically, and they're demonstrably causing harm to society by enabling corruption and money laundering.

To address your concern, I think the problem is that a) the address is publically available in your country, and b) your police is so violent that they weaponize prank calls to lethal threats. That's an issue of shit policing.

The idea that you can exercise power in society and have zero accountability and demand to stay anonymous is either a) an cyberpunk fantasy, or b) a cleptocrat's dream.

>by enabling corruption and money laundering.

The owner of the company being anonymous or not is not relevant here. These things can be done by people other than the owner and these people are already anonymous.

>That's an issue of shit policing.

It's an issue with every service. You can get prank pizzas, prank Uber eats, prank door dash, prank packages, prank letters (glitter, stinky, etc), etc. Almost no one ever validates addresses before a service uses them.

>The idea that you can exercise power in society and have zero accountability and demand to stay anonymous

I never required the former. There could still be a process to make anonymously owned businesses accountable.

Maybe the police should validate claims with a little more scrutiny than pizza hut. Nobody's getting killed by a prank pizza.

They validate the claim by paying you a visit. That's the point of the prank.

Well, no, they usually smash your door down. That's the point of the "prank"

There's a lot of steps between "call from random kid" and "smash someone's door down" that cops choose not to take

> It's an issue with every service.

Classic false equivalence. Being shot to death by overzealous and unaccountable swat teams is NOT the same as getting delivered a pizza you didn't order.

It's not a false eqivalence. Personally I still wouldn't want to share my home addresses even if swatting was not a thing. If bad and more bad thing exist. The more bad thing not existing doesn't mean there is nothing bad left.

It's fine to not want your address shared and you don't even need to justify that opinion, you could just want privacy in general. But what you said is a false equivalence. Just because two things are both bad, does not mean they are equivalent. Mild inconvenience is bad, violent death is bad, does not mean mild inconvenience is the same as, and therefore directly comparable with, violent death.

I said that not validating addresses was what was equivalent. I had not said anything about the relative badness of each thing.

Shocking. Crooks getting ripped off by the crooks they hire.

“Don’t worry, we’ll put the company in our name, but you’ll still control it.”

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