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[–] 4 points 13 hours ago* (2 children)

Even if one has one's very own personal single-owner company, you keep company stuff separate from personal stuff.

There are accounting reasons for this, there are management reasons for this, there are even legal reasons for this (for example if you own limited company is sued, keeping its shit totally separate from your shit means none of your stuff is part of the discovery process and if it loses the lawsuit, none of your personal stuff gets taken).

This is even more so when the company is not yours and you're just an employee - you don't want company troubles to end up hitting you and the company doesn't want you troubles to end up hitting it, so it's a win-win for both sides.

Always suspect when companies want to start mixing company stuff with personal stuff - in my experience they're either small amateurish operations, they're doing it to get you to do unpaid work for them outside work hours (i.e. the "company phone" that gets calls from management at odd hours) or its some weird tax evasion scheme and/or ties you more to the company (the "company car" that you don't really use for company stuff).

This guy fucked things up massivelly, even if a $118k "lesson" is maybe a bit too much.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago* (1 child)

    It's not a bit too much, people have to understand what things are worth snd what risks they're subjecting those things to. It could have been an idiot in a $118k car changing lanes without looking and wrecking $118k that way, or someone using a company card for "de minimis" personal purchases. They're both things that have no negative consequences 999 times out of 1000, and the 1000th time something goes wrong and you're SOL.

    We're all smart enough to understand the concept of tail risks, most of us just choose to gamble with our lives and money anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

    It's a bit much when that's a transaction done with a retail customer (even if the card used was a business one, it looks like that was used on a personal account with Google, not a company account) which should legally have some form of limit to protect consumers of unlimited charges or if you want to be insanely neoliberal, at least some kind of insurance (just like how Insurance is mandatory in most of the World for driving a car).

    I mean, even in Financial Investment there are at least mandated by law very prominent warnings to retail customers if they want to trade the more dangerous products with unlimited liability, such as Futures, because such customers are not considered domain experts and people even without those warnings already generally know and treat Financial Investments as something where a lot of money at risk and thus are more careful with it even when they're non-experts.

    This wouldn't be a "bit too much" if we were talking of somebody doing it on a professional setting were it's their fucking work to know what the fuck they're doing, but for a retail customer who is not tracking what's going on in their account day in and day out and who is not expected to know all the ins and outs of it, unlimited liability with no notifications at all is insanelly anti-consumer and only possible in a zero-regulations jurisdiction.

    That kind of shit were there are ZERO mechanisms to avoid that a single dumb but understandable mistake by a non-expert retail customer explodes into a life-changing bill, is very much a facet of the typical American way of treating common people as nothing more than money-bags for big corporations to squeeze.

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