Delaware is the state where a bunch of companies are legally but not physically headquartered, ro evade state taxes and regulations.
States need to rethink their tax laws for companies: If you do business here, you pay taxes here.
My former employer was a Delaware corporation, the company still has to pay our state taxes.
According to Wikipedia: Delaware charges no income tax on corporations not operating within the state, so taking advantage of Delaware’s other benefits does not result in taxation. At the same time, Delaware has a particularly aggressive tax on banks that locate in the state. However, in general, the state is viewed as a positive location for corporate tax purposes because favorable laws of incorporation allow companies to minimize corporate expenditures.
So, yeah, I was oversimplifying.
deleted by creator
We’ve finally automated the one thing executives wanted most: plausible deniability. Profits go to the human owners, bad decisions go to the algorithm, and victims get to sue a corporate shell with a chatbot for a CEO. Delaware isn’t building the future of business. It’s building the ultimate accountability escape room.
I.e. delware’s rasion d’etre for decades anyway. A tax haven banana state with no identity beyond being the place people register businesses.
If these are relatively inexpensive to set up and dispose of, corporations could even set them up automatically for individual consumer transactions and between individual employees and themselves.
For example, you go to a fast food restaurant, and you are actually being served by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, founded 2 seconds ago, and leasing the right to operate in the building amongst other similar AI companies, as well as the part-time services of McGermKing Employment Services fd176cc4-bb95-4c1b-80e7-2aec39f02917, who hires a human to take your order, and McGermKing Employment Services 5336b4f1-0594-4df1-8387-5ec9b638db77, who assembles your GermBurger (TM used under licence by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd).
If you pay them and they make money, it goes back to the owner. If you get food poisoning and sue McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd (since the parent company is totally innocent and some other subsidiaries are just honest suppliers), it comes out of the money they made selling you the burger, and if their liability to you was higher than the cost of one burger, well, the AI corporation tried its honest best at business, but you can line up for your share of the payout - keeping in mind they also owe franchise fees to the parent company out of that burger, so the AI liquidator will divide up the assets, and if it doesn’t cover liabilities, the parent company loses its 50c investment into McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, and how sad it was a bad outcome for you as a creditor.
Likewise if an employee gets hurt, same story.
This is absolutely guaranteed to happen. Companies already use insolvency law to avoid liability.
That sounds like some shit straight out of Snowcrash. And then we got ICE buying a couple of robot dogs…
“As part of Mr. Lee’s good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido’s in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
I feel like that would survive 2 milliseconds in court
Yeah, in a country with a functional justice system, it sure would.
Well yes, because that is the lifetime of the company before it is replaced with the next one that had nothing to do with any of the stuff, sorry not sorry.
I think it’s actually the legislative intent that they can do stuff like that and blame it on the AI. If the law says that there’s no liability unless it was intentional fraud, then the courts are going to follow that unless there is a higher law that overrides it.
That’s why it’s important to fight things like this before they become law.
They’re really rushing to leave the bleakest cyberpunk distopia in the dust.
Oh no, this AI company has started hiring hitmen to go after republican congressmen and senators 😱
Welp, nothing we can do. They’re incorporated in Delaware 🤷♂️
Hitmen would still be liable. Better to hire a swarm of drones or robodogs.
Don’t ai tend to lean to progressive anyways? They go stupid when you try to force them to be conservative.
You can fine tune a model to do anything you want, even call itself mechahitler.
They go stupid when you try to force them to be conservative.
Curiously, so do humans.
SpaceX.AI is working on that problem.
Isn’t Delaware a famous tax haven?
Famous for hiding business owners and shielding them from legal consequences. I haven’t heard about them being a tax haven; they just have a really thick corporate veil.
Sounds like this will be used to break laws and avoid responsibility. Just point to the black box to avoid fines and jail. A loophole for society to decend in to lawlessness and more corruption.
Of course it’s Delaware
For those who don’t know, delaware is basically three taxhavens in a trenchcoat pretending to be a state.
This move is Delaware taking a bold step into 21st century ways of hiding the crimes and wealth of the rich.
Anything except banking
Quick add AI to your bittorrent clients, and take deposits for your crypto/gambling exchanges!
After investigation it was discovered the AI was designed to extract maximum profit fo the owners and hide business failings until it collapsed, leaving investors and creditors holding the debt.
The courts fined the owners $50 each.
Repeat.
Just like all the crypto, AI, and app scams these days.
Make big promises to inverstors, make a memecoin, steal all the data, pump and dump with the money and the courts don‘t do shit. Seems to be the Zoomer business model. Well, Trump‘s MAGA losers too.
The legal fiction of the corporate shield is leading our species to its doom. Profit without accountability encourages destructive behavior.
What do you mean by “corporate shield”? Are you referring to limited liability? Corporations are still accountable for the laws that they break.
I think they mean the corporate veil that is typically assumed, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
It provides a layer of liability protection for the personal assets of the humans behind the company when it comes to debts. But it also provides protection from criminal liability in many cases when it comes to horrible non-financial crimes.
Um, how? Corporations don’t care if they go under. They also don’t care if they commit genocide or are responsible for major industrial disasters.
What’s the better idea? Without that legal fiction, new businesses would grind to a screeching halt and the entrenched monopolies would be even more powerful, as if that isn’t the root of our economic problems already.
The answer is not letting any company grow into a monopoly. There are actual laws against that. Break up existing monopolies. Then make business owners way more accountable than they are today. I know it is hard to prove intent in fraud cases, but any sort of creative accounting, transfer of debt between companies, bonuses that aren’t in alignment with company performance, stock buybacks and other manipulations of valuation, and a myriad other obvious fraudulent behaviors should be punished with long prison time.
I’ve been screaming about monopolies for 3-years now. Everything people bitch about capitalism boils down to monopolies.
BTW, stock buybacks used to be illegal until 1982. Ain’t that a thing?
An AI led business is a very important building block of rogue AI finishing off humankind. How else will it secure enough unsupervisable compute?
I hate it how these people take every warning of things that could go wrong as advise for policy.
So nobody is responsible for a technology that runs all our digital systems…wtf fuck are we doing?
wtf fuck
I choose to believe the first “f” stands for “fuckity”.
How long before an AI decides to sell drugs online? I wonder how the courts will handle it?
We can call that AI “Dread Pirate Robot”
Shut down that exact business and imprison the head AI model, probably.
Just a little cocaine. As a treat.
Make infinite money. Make no mistakes.
