Can someone clarify this for me? I thought that businesses generally were not able to book gift card revenue until after the gift card was redeemed. If that is the case, then I don't see how this really helps them. It's not like they can use that money to pay bills.
You think booking revenue at a later date restricts them from spending the cash they receive now? It helps them because they receive cash that can be physically spent for whatever they need. FASB guidelines just prevents them from matching those expenses to revenue from a tax perspective. If I receive $250,000 in gift card sales in 2020 but all $250,000 get redeemed in 2021, then your revenue in 2020 should not reflect this $250k, but instead be reflected in 2021. All else equal, in the event the restaurant owner took the convenient and simple path of recognizing the expenses in 2020, it would just mean their tax bill in 2021 would be much higher because their net revenue (sales - COGs) would be high as a result of the $250k in revenue being realized.
When you work with the assumption that police usually only arrest a person when they have strong evidence that person actually committed the crime, it's not that surprising.
Whether that is a good working assumption to begin with is another debate.
It's a poor assumption that violates due process and presumption of innocence. Applying the assumption makes our current justice system act in the manner that is similar to some of the original complaints of American revolutionaries about British colonial rule.
I think there are two distinct questions that you are co-mingling. The first is, do police only arrest (and prosecutors charge) people when they have strong evidence that they committed the crime? I think the answer is, "Yes, most of the time, in many districts" - but not all of the time, and not in all districts.
The second question is, "Should the court system act like the police only arrest guilty people"? And the answer is, absolutely not.
From your answer, I guess that you only cared about the second question. But the first question is the one raised by ProCicero, and is also an important question.
No the question of due process applies to who, how, and when the police decide to arrest people too. They should be expected to strongly apply due process and the presumption of innocence too. It's too easy to give police and prosecutors a pass on misbehavior if we characterize their primary responsibilities as focused on catching the criminals.
And then the police operate on the assumption that in ambiguous cases they should err on the side of catching the potential criminal and let the courts sort it out.
While a bit off topic, this is how it happens in Japan. They will only prosecute cases with a high probability of successful prosecution. It’s one of the reasons their success rate is in the high nineties. Of course in some cases they also use coerced confessions that are facilitated by extended detentions without access to lawyers.
But also lots of serious crimes get swept under the rug because they will not prosecute with only flimsy evidence.
You probably cannot be compelled to say what your password is,but you can be compelled to place your finger on the fingerprint scanner, provide retna scans, and provide other biometric data to unlock encryption. The difference being that you cannot be compelled to reveal information you have in your own mind. The rest of your body, however, is fair game.
That makes sense. There really is no reason the FBI would ever need backdoor access to EOUSA, let alone compromise open source VPN software in order to get it. There are much easier ways for them to get what they want.
Nitpicking here, but the parent agency of the FBI is the Department of Justice. The EOUSA is the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, and is basically the back office support for the 93 US Attorney offices. It's parent organization is also the Department of Justice.
Basically, he is saying the DOJ planted a back door so that it could spy on its own internal network.
Factions in government are sometimes caught spying on gov organizations that have oversight/control athority over them. That was the real scandal of Edward Snowden's bombshell (that was quickly covered up).
That wasn't just any server, it was The Silk Road. The Icelandic authorities went through their own court process, though, getting whatever their equivalent to a search warrant is first, then turning over a complete image of the server to the FBI.
> The Icelandic authorities went through their own court process, though, getting whatever their equivalent to a search warrant is first, then turning over a complete image of the server to the FBI.
Which reinforces my point? These countries offer people nothing.
I used his ventilated prose method to parse out and simplify complex statutes. One example was the definition of a slot machine, which consisted of two paragraphs with two sentences each, that took up an entire page of text. It had some deeply nested clauses and an ungodly amount of commas and semi colons. I started with one sentence per line, then broke to one clause per line. From there, I used indentation to sort out exactly which clauses were dependent on what. It made explaining the law to others a lot easier.
I'm very curious to know how you are able to get precise and accurate enough identification information from public websites to be able to credibly run a "background check" on someone. I used to work in the criminal justice system, and had unlimited access to every single criminal case initiated in my state going back for almost 40 years. It's difficult enough for a trained person to do it by hand, let alone automating it. How do you provide any guarantee of accuracy?
My wife's SSN/credit history/online identities have in the past been mistakenly tied up with her sibling's. This has since been corrected with all the appropriate agencies and organizations.
However, from what I've noticed of search results over time, these background check (AND identity verification) sites crawl each other and create a kind of feedback loop, as I've been noticing that some of these pages will falsely report parts of her sibling's background among her own, and falsely flag her as having certain ugly events in her past that don't actually belong to her. This is concerning, as her career area cares a lot about employees having a clean background, and employers using these cheap automated options see cheap, inaccurate results. She has a squeaky clean background with a high credit score and impressive educational credentials, while her sibling has had run-ins with the law and bad debts. I'm concerned about how this will affect her future career prospects.
Beyond background checks, identity verification is a big concern as well. You may have noticed some services ask you to confirm certain facts about your past (street names of where you've lived, schools you attended, jobs and cars you've held). When pulling her credit bureau reports, some of these verifications required confirming facts about her sibling rather than her own in order to gain access.
Like I said, these issues have been fixed with all the "official" record-keeping organizations; however, since the fix, I've been noticing increasing issues with the original mistakes propagating to 3rd-party background-check organizations.
These services cause more problems than they solve, and should require consent, oversight, and civil or criminal penalties associated with a failure to meet high quality standards.
> These services cause more problems than they solve, and should require consent, oversight, and civil or criminal penalties associated with a failure to meet high quality standards.
Existing law does not proscribe recklessly sharing damaging false information about people?
I have tried to pursue legal action against companies maintaining inaccurate information using defamation as grounds, to no avail. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
First, the process of automating a source is not as simple as 'grab data, send to person that creates the case'.
We have many many layers of precaution and validation both by humans and other automated systems, that helps guarantee accuracy.
On top of this, even public records has reporting rules in the industry. There are dates, specific charges, charge types (Misdemeanor/Felony), and a battery of other rules that the information is processed through in order to ensure we do not report information that we are not allowed.
We always lean to the side of throwing a case to a human. In the circumstance that anything new, unrecognized, or even slightly off happens, we toss the case to a team that processes the information by hand. At that point, we are simply a scraper for information and we cut out the step of having a human order and retrieve results.
We do not go back 40 years. Industry standards dictate that most records older than 7 years are expunged from Employment background checks. And most of our clients don't care about more than 3 years worth, with exceptions like Murder, Federal Crimes, and some obviously heinous things.
We also run a number of other tests, outside of public records to provide full background data. We have integrations with major labs to schedule drug screens, we allow those who are having a background check run on them to fill out an application to provide reasoning and information from their point of view to allow customers to empathize with an employee.
We also have a robust dispute system. The person having a background check run on them receives the report before the client requesting it in order to review the results and dispute anything they find wrong. These cases are always handled by a human, and often involve intensive research, no cost spared, to ensure the accuracy of the report.
There's a plethora of other things I'm missing, but if you have any specific questions, I'm happy to answer.
*EDIT
To clarify, there is a lot of information in public records. It isn't unclear or ambiguous at all. Motor Vehicle and Court records are extremely in-depth and spare no detail.
I would imagine a live person audits the information collected by the scrapers, thereby eliminating the hassle of collecting it from multiple different sources.
As a private person, we only have access to court documents on a state or county base. Any central database we have access to would be made my scrapers.
There is very little liability protection for a single-member company. You are usually going to be personally liable for your actions, and can get sued individually along with the company. Incorporation / LLC does not protect you from acts where you are also personally liable, and it does not shield your personal assets in that case either.
This depends on the country. Most (single member) companies in EU countries have excellent protections in place for directors and shareholders as long as you don't do anything illegal.
What? This is 100% incorrect. Unless you make obvious errors, all of your personal assets are protected.
> Like shareholders of a corporation, all LLC owners are protected from personal liability for business debts and claims. This means that if the business itself can't pay a creditor—such as a supplier, a lender, or a landlord—the creditor cannot legally come after an LLC member's house, car, or other personal possessions.
The main issue for single-member LLCs in the US is to actually operate it as a separate entity. Don't share assets, accounts, etc. Don't personally guarantee debt unless you absolutely have to (and then you'll be liable for that). And of course you're still liable if you personally break the law. If you hire an employee and they assault a customer or something, your company may be sued like any larger company, but they probably won't be able to pierce the veil and go after you personally to collect.
