It has been a decades long journey getting here. There are so many contributing factors it is hard to even know where to begin. The most important thing to remember is that about half the country is very unhappy with the way things are going.
I think the best advice is use something you are comfortable with. But the second best advice is hopefully that isn't WordPress. Yes, you can do it in WP, but you would have so many more options if you picked something like Angular or React as your frontend. Then outsource auth and payments (auth0 and Stripe, for example) and that will take you pretty far. Good luck!
Back in my freelance days I had a client who refused to pay. I took him to small claims court and won. Actually collected the money.
- small claims court is very easy and relatively quick. no need for a lawyer.
- there is a cap on the amount, so I won $10k, not the full amount owed. But close enough and much better than $0.
- make every reasonable attempt to resolve this prior to filing but, as stated throughout this thread, do not stress yourself out. This should be a fire-and-forget process. Consider the money lost, and if you win, it's just bonus.
> Consider the money lost, and if you win, it's just bonus.
I think this is the most important part of the advice. Treat it like a gambling budget that you can lose without feeling bad about it. I know that’s harder to do retroactively than setting aside $200 in chips to play cards, but start adjusting your finances now for that possibility.
I was in this position only once and the person who ripped me off got away with it because the amount of my time spent was small enough that it wasn’t worth pursuing, so I’m not a great example of success in this area. But I’m still mad about the fact that I was treated that way and switching to an “it’s gone” mindset helped me process my emotions about it. My anger is now principled rather than emotional.
If you can do small claims, you should. I have won and lost in small claims, but it's very simple. A matter of filling out some paperwork and an hour or two (unusual) in court.
It depends on the scenario. I had an issue with a notorious tow service in my city, won a few thousand dollars, and placed a lien on one of his trucks. After a diligent search, the only truck I could absolutely identity was a $150k recovery vehicle that printed money for him.
When we showed up with his competitor to tow his truck, he appeared with an envelope containing the full judgement in cash.
The guy was such an asshole, I would have gladly spent a few thousand dollars just to inflict pain and disruption upon him.
As a counter example, San Diego County Sheriff charges $2500 to levy a vehicle[1] - and I'm certain there's more fees involved since there will be a title involved somewhere, possibly a bank/lienholder, etc.
So if you were owed a couple thousand, this would not be worth paying to enforce. Unless you're made of money and highly principled (as a fellow pot-stirrer, my hat would be off to you).
Totally get it… ymmv! This was several years ago, but where I lived the cost was around $500, plus a 5% fee on the sale.
It cost me only the $500 because they had a change of heart when the hook arrived. I was really disappointed, selling the vehicle would’ve been very satisfying.
I don't know of any state or jurisdiction where you would be legally allowed to just show up and tow away someone's property without involving law enforcement in some capacity.
Ignoring a court order to pay is a little more serious than ignoring an invoice. The latter is a civil claim, I would guess the former might be criminal.
Enforcement of Small Claims decisions are very often left up to you... and by virtue of being Small Claims, often are not worth the cost to collect anyway.
Check your state laws. Here, there are a variety of liens available to enforce a small claims judgement. While foreclosing a real-estate lien requires an attorney, the process begins with a debtor's examination. Being called in to court to explain your finances convinces many people to pay up.
So what's the point of it then? If ignoring the order is not criminal, I'd think at least it opens you up to having a lien filed on your assets or something?
Say the landscaping contractor screws up your yard, and you want a refund of the $2500 you paid. They refuse so you take them to Small Claims.
Let's say you win... what happens next? Usually nothing. You have a judgement you can rightfully enforce, but every path of enforcement is going to cost you more time and more money (wage garnishment, etc).
For such a relatively small amount of money, it can quickly become not worth while to collect.
For your county, you can look up what your local Sheriff Office charges to provide these services. Fees vary by location. Fees tend to stack as you have to file paperwork with multiple entities, etc. This all takes a lot of time as well, and you are not going to recover any of the enforcement expenses either.
The math is different in each situation - but you can see where it can often become not worth enforcement.
Collection costs would be added to what the person owes, I would think. In the OP's case at least, I'd ask the judge to include that in the judgement, given that the customer has already demonstrated a reluctance to pay.
You would have to sue again, in small claims court, for recovery of the fees.
The court will not preemptively award estimated collection fees since you have not yet been burdened by them and they are unknown. It's not like a regular civil case where attorney's fees are known by time you are receiving judgement.
It's an open and shut case to get a judgement in your favor on recovery of the fees. Just anticipate two small claims court appearances (or maybe recursive appearances if they don't pay the recovery fees) and it will be fine. Eventually they will just pay.
This doesn't seem like that cynical of a take at all. The US is terrible at infrastructure projects. I feel like you would never go wrong betting against them. Or at least betting that they take 10x the time and cost than predicted.
The Brightline rail in Florida which connects Miami to Orlando began construction in 2014 had its first service in 2018 and full route in 2023. I took it last year, it was just fine.
I’ve begun to see that sometimes the private sector can be much, much better at managing these infrastructure projects than the State of California .
The initial bill for HSR was one of the first things I remember voting on. If I recall correctly, it was a bond for 8b dollars. I voted against it because I had extreme doubts that would be the end of it.
If it actually cost $8B, I would have supported it.
I don't think you can treat those as equivalent. The arguments against airplanes were about physics, which is comparatively easy. The whole point of this essay, and KSR's companion novel Aurora, is that people who get excited about generation ships tend to only think about the physics and engineering problems, and handwave away the problems of ecology, biology, sociology, ethics (!), and politics (!!) because they don't find them interesting, even though these problems are actually much harder to solve. His complaint is that by sweeping the hard problems under the rug, people are making this out to be a much more feasible operation than it actually is.
In order to prove him wrong, you'd have to really grapple with the question of how to have a self-sustaining ecology in space. This is something I basically never see in online space boosterism, and note that empirical attempts to answer it like Biosphere 2 ended in complete failure (and those were on Earth, which is orders of magnitude easier).
Physics might seem easy to you now but flying was an impossible dream for most of history.
The other problems may become more amenable - one just can't know what will happen. Amazing things like CRISPR - an incredible tool that lets us edit genes - appear suddenly and change everything.
Sequencing a Genome once seemed a massive task and now it's no big deal - so perhaps some of these problems will end up like that.
We can also re-engineer ourselves and that might help a lot.
I just think it is a case of thinking small. A few key advances and all the problems are solved. For example:
- Increased lifespan making the trip possible in 1 generation
- A hollowed out asteroid or other extremely large biosphere. It is not hard to imagine something large enough to overcome the ecological problems
- Virtual reality (the holodeck) if you're still worried about social issues in a large space. BTW, most teens today would be happy to stay in a closed room, as long as they had a phone. (I exaggerate, but only a little)
All of these things are reasonable extrapolations of existing tech. In 200 years, I'm sure a whole lot more will be possible.
The ethics of generation ships always seems like a ridiculous issue to worry about: no one born today for a say in the circumstances of their birth, nott the ideology they get raised in. And there's a lot of bad options if that's anywhere on Earth.
That's not the same thing and you know it. If you were resentful at having been born into a sealed can the side of a large office building, with a meager lifestyle and-- by necessity-- an authoritarian government that chooses your occupation, spouse, etc., and you heard about the paradise of Earth, you know perfectly well your anger wouldn't be assuaged by "no one born there has a say in their circumstances either".
People are born everyday on Earth into far worse circumstances then "we live in this spaceship". The spaceship by comparison is paradise (though it's also worth noting you thought the point wasn't quite strong enough if you didn't start adding modifiers: no democracy, the government must be authoritarian...)
Exactly. If growing up on a spaceship was all you ever knew, it wouldn't seem like a problem. It only seems like a problem to people who grew up with a lot of choices on Earth. Most people on our planet don't have a lot of choices in how they live their life.
Coincidentally, I'm reading A City On Mars (by the husband and wife team behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics [0]) and it's pretty much all about poking at those legal, sociological, and medical problems that keep getting skipped over.
Well the big flaw here is that he just outright throws away the idea of FTL travel. A lot of that friction will be reduced if we ever figure out how to break that (which yes, is extremely tricky. Even IF we figure it out we'd need to also counter time dilation to properly verify).
Now sure, the politics on who and what gets to go to thr next world will doom many. But physics can alleviate the whole "we'll tear each other apart over 200 years of space travel" part
I won't be the one to solve it, but we thought the sound barrier was unbreakable a few centuries ago. I won't underestimate human ingenuity.
I think more likely is we figure out wormholes. If we can't go light speed we can instead fold space like a piece of paper and reduce the space we need to Traverse. That may or may not be as easy as FTL.
This is a really hard lesson to learn and it takes most people (myself included) many tries to learn it. From reading your post, it is super clear that you understand the lesson-- validate your idea early. But understanding the lesson and actually learning it are worlds apart.
You have put a lot of time into this project, and it is not going to go anywhere. This is a tough realization. One that you naturally want to argue against. It's easy to be stubborn. But the more time and effort you put into this, the more time and effort you are wasting.
The positives: you have built a foundation and undoubtedly learned some things along the way. Take that knowledge and pivot to something that people want/need. Good luck!
Their time hasn't been wasted so long as they've learned from it. In this case it's fair to say that technical knowledge has been gained and business knowledge as well.
As you say, it's best for them to take this knowledge and apply it on the next project. If they keep it up then they'll eventually find success.
I feel like this is one area that requires a less extreme approach. It feels silly to forego batteries completely, but equally silly to put 100kW of batteries in a car. Most car trips for most people are going to be well under 50 miles.
I have a BMW 330e with 12kWh battery (~20 miles range), mostly drive locally in the city, and the car reports ~55% of driving is electric for the last two months. Occasional longer trips make up the vast majority of non-electric driving.
You need to be able to plug it in at home though, even if it's just a regular wall socket. No one is going to go to a charging station for 20 miles of range.
Just like nobody is buying 8 ounce coffee tumblers, nobody is buying 50 mile range cars. Electricity and coffee is cheap. The coffee tumblers and EV batteries are not. So you buy it bigger than it needs to be, fill it up as far as you can, and maybe share some before refilling.
In the US, I think it is more likely that we will regulate automobile speed than guns. I thought there might be a joke here, but sadly, this is just true.
