This isn't groundbreaking science, sure, but it is a great way to get people interested in a topic. After all, it wouldn't be on Hacker News if the word Wordle wasn't in it. I'm a huge fan of using things like this to teach science, math and engineering.
We started using "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" as our technical interview, and people _love_ it. They get really into it and have fun. It's pretty easy to do inefficiently, and it's great to watch people build on it and try to improve their scores.
It has two benefits: 1/ everyone clearly understands the problem 2/ people see it as fun rather than a drag.
Another small benefit: Everybody understands this isn't what the job is. Nobody is hiring you to beat Wordle, and you solving this is clearly not somehow on the path to their actual task, they are asking you if you can write software which solves a problem and you're demonstrating that you can do that, which makes sense.
I think "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" sounds like a lot of work, so that'd probably be a "No" from me unless it was last hurdle for a job I was enthusiastic about but unlike "Write a program to solve this class of graph problem" I at least wouldn't be worried that you're trying to get me to do work for free.
Actually Wordle solver as Code Review task sounds like maybe a more interesting live interview than the one we do today. "Here's this mediocre Wordle solver, what is your feedback in review?" has the advantage that they've probably seen a Wordle puzzle before but it's not an example problem they've seen in fifty textbooks.
Well, the 100 Wordles is just "Solve one Wordle" in a for-loop. If you're an even somewhat decent engineer, it takes under 10 minutes to get it working (inefficiently).
Then we encourage people to do whatever they want next: improve their average score, build a frontend UI for it, solve on Hard Mode, etc.
In the past, we never did technical interview questions like this. We always asked people to bring their own project, and work the way they want to. However, with the addition of AI, we hit a wall: we want people to feel they can use AI in a way that mimics how they'd actually work day-to-day, BUT we also need a simple check to make sure they understood engineering basics.
it's a drag... i mean if you're 22 it's fun. if you love games, or you're older, or mature, i don't know. the pretentious stuff Josh Wardle says is tough. (https://gdcvault.com/play/1027882/-Wordle-Doing-the-Opposite). he says all sorts of stuff that is wrong ("innate understanding of language" except if you're a kid, which is the average gamer...)
it's like when interviews asked people to implement 2048. it's not even the best version of that game, Threes! is.
I think there's a bit of nuance here. AOC is directionally correct, but of course there's exceptions.
I do think Taylor Swift and JK Rowling "earned" a billion dollars.
I don't think Elon Musk or Donald Trump "earned" their wealth.
Elon, for example, did earn a lot of it. People gave him money for Teslas.
But he disproportionally makes profit off regulatory credits, selling his own companies to each other, and burdening his companies with debt. He's forced people to work through pandemics, undermined the SEC, stolen data from the government, bought elections, and (if you want to believe recent stories) may have even helped cheat in the most recent presidential election. He directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to DOGE budget cuts, all while getting billions of dollars worth of contracts via SpaceX and xAI.
Or Bezos. Amazon uses our roads and infrastructure. A majority of Amazon warehouse workers rely on public assistance. I believe Bezos is a phenomenal founder, but his returns have subsidized by us.
There's a reason Taylor Swift doesn't get brought up when people talk about the rich. You _can_ earn a billion dollars, but more often than not you have to screw over a lot of people to get there.
I don't understand this dichotomy between the people you've mentioned—nobody makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a vacuum by themselves. Swift had her parents, staff, record companies that helped push and advertise her and rowling has a similar story.
That and Taylor does get brought up the whole time for being rich and wasteful, I can't count how many times I've heard about her incredibly short private jet trips in the past few years.
Your criticism of Bezos are also a bit ridiculous. Nearly every company that isn't B2B SaaS junk uses roads in some degree. I fail to see how the warehouse workers being on public assistance have anything to do with Bezos—if you wanted them to be self sufficient a politician could increase the minimum wage.
Your criticisms of Musk dishonest, but I would also argue that he didn't "earn" a lot of the money for Tesla, as he's just a jackass with a bachelors in econ that did none of the work on it.
AOC/Bernie types have never been directionally correct, as allowing the government to rob you in America will usually not correlate with any increase in QoL for the general populace. Someone on here described taxes in America and Western countries as "tithes" like you would pay to the mafia as "protection" money, where every dollar you give them makes them more capable of extorting the next one out of you.
AOC once summed up her political position as "I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live," and I would consider that directionally right.
I don't think it's a fallacy since AOC so clearly implies, if not outright states, that the reason people are poor in America is because people richer than them have too much money, and should have less. If that applies to them, why doesn't it apply to her? At what level is the cutoff?
No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it. She's dedicating her biggest resource, her time, to fixing this.
There's a greater wealth inequality in the US now than there was at any other point in time.
> No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it.
What's the difference? Either way, she's trying to change it so people can't have so much money.
And why? To what end? How does trying to tear down people who have money help anyone else? Why doesn't she instead spend that time trying to create more worth and opportunity for people who don't?
Because she believes that the economy is closer to zero sum than you do. One person having a lot means another person has less, not just in terms of material distribution either, but also the distribution of power.
It is rather strange to have a system where the problem is lots of people don't have access to material goods and power, and you see a few people with huge amounts of those things, and not think that maybe those few people should have less so the majority can have more. You may disagree based on economic analysis, but surely that follows intuitively?
I think she's wrong in almost every way. AOC is a demagogue who focuses on getting her constituents to dislike people with money, and in order to do so, she massively oversimplifies things.
First of all, the average person has more power today than at almost any point in the past. If you're obsessively focused on making people hate others with money, then, of course, you're going to spread the message that money is the only thing that contributes to power, but that's far from the case. Any scholar of personal power would tell you that that's incredibly oversimplified to the point of being almost laughable.
Compared to, say, 70 years ago, the average person has a greatly increased ability to: publish and distribute ideas, organize large amounts of people quickly, start a business, influence culture without being gate-kept by institutions, gain and maintain attention without being gate-kept by institutions, etc. Education is better and more broadly available, capital is more accessible, legal and bureaucratic tools are easier to use, geographic constraints matter much less, more paths to elite influence exist. And of course, far more people are included in what "the average person" is, more can vote, more can be part of society. And this is over the exact same time period that income inequality has increasing. Income equality is only part of the picture when it comes to personal power, not everything, as AOC would have you believe. Also, there are more people in the upper and middle classes today than there ever have been in the United States!
Also, she's hugely oversimplifying the economic landscape. There aren't just two parties, rich and poor. There's a huge third party known as the government. And that party's express mandate is to take care of the people. And the people pay into that party's coffers in order to help it do so. And they pay at progressively higher rates based on how rich they are. The top 1% alone pay about 40% of federal income taxes.
So yeah, if you just completely oversimplify things and pretend that this entity doesn't exist, and you came into a situation where the rich had all they money and power, you might propose a system exactly like this. And I would agree. We should tax people, and that tax should be progressive, and that tax should go to a central government, and that central government should have stewards who we elect to help redistribute the money. And that's what we do.
But these stewards are also so busy telling everyone to hate each other -- hate the trans, hate the atheists, hate the rich, hate the men, hate the conservatives, hate the business owners, hate the elites, hate the immigrants, hate the blacks, etc. The average person is extremely susceptible to demagoguery. It's much easier to hate and blame your neighbor than it is to actually look into government budgetary figures.
And it's much nicer as a steward of the government budget to get everybody hating their neighbors than to have everybody scrutinizing what you're doing with their money.
Have you actually listened to AOC? Because this entire post feels like one massive strawman. I don't think AOC has argued things were better 70 years ago, and I think you know that. She has correctly suggested the wealthiest country in the world, one that routinely exploits poorer countries, shouldn't have citizens that are afraid to call an ambulance. That's tremendous failure.
Your government budget comment is just fluff. If you actually engaged with her in good faith, you'd realize she is not someone who thinks government spending should go unchecked, and the only issue is how much it's getting. She just disagrees with the right on where it should go. For instance, it shouldn't go towards bombing a country for 3 months just to wind up paying them billions for the same deal we already had. I think we can agree having a world leader that is so easily baited into pointless conflicts is bad for our budget. But I guess we balance it out by slashing social programs.
A lot of people's interest in government budgets coincides with the introduction of DOGE. That is to say, their entire understanding of it ends with what Musk tells them. Most people have no idea how it works, and half the things they suggest are already happening. It shouldn't shock you to know some people think billionaires could pay a little more and we can be smarter about where the money goes.
I didn't say that AOC said that things were better 70 years ago. I said she makes it sound like people have decreasing power due to income inequality, so I'm comparing to times where income was vastly more equal, and I simply don't think her claims hold up. Your-income-relative-the-richest-people's-income is, imo, a very small factor of how much overall power you have in society as an individual, compared to the other factors I listed. Yet it is repeatedly harped on as if it's the only factor that matters.
I don't believe I said that AOC thinks government spending should go unchecked. But the vast majority of comments I've read from AOC seem to blame the plight of the poor on the success of the rich.
People have decreasing power because the very people AOC is targeting are nakedly taking power from us, thumbing in our faces, and then whining when they get called out on it. This goes way beyond hoarding wealth. There's no world in which Palantir exists and you can seriously argue these rich people are not our problem. I think AOC feels a way about the oligopoly that many of us do. The lobbies that flood our elections, the social media companies pumping filth to make the internet a hellscape. We do not have to pretend they need to be coddled anymore. People have had enough. Yes, they are scumbags, and they can pay more, and nobody gives a fuck if they think different. Heaven knows they deserve worse. If they acted like real human beings for even a few seconds, they would be treated like kings. But instead they ratfuck the country
The only real question is how someone can delude themselves into buying the Aw Sucks routine of the most powerful people on the planet.
For one, if she “anonymously” donates to charities, how would anyone ever attribute any donations to her??
For another, as a sibling comment points out, AOC can have a much greater impact by influencing policies that help the people than through charitable donations, which, let’s face it, are just a bandaid on the structural issues that lead to such wealth inequality. Making something one’s professional goal when in a position of influence is much more impactful than optional activities on the side like charitable donations.
> if she “anonymously” donates to charities, how would anyone ever attribute any donations to her?
If she was truly moral, she wouldn't need to be feted for her actions. Virtue comes from doing the right thing even when other people are not looking.
Her using her position of power to extract money from Peter and give it to Paul does not bestow on her any morality or virtue points. One could characterize it as "buying votes with other peoples' money".
> But the reason it's a "fallacy" is AOC could donate 100% of her current salary for 63,000 years and that would equal 1% of Elon's current net worth.
I didn't say anything about Elon's money being related to AOC's morals. I said AOC's morals were dependent on her donating her money without bragging about it. The claim of logical fallacy does not follow.
I don’t have an opinion on this specific proposal, but I am glad to hear a politician talking about the effects of AI.
I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)
I'm really confused by this blog. There seems to be a large portion of the story missing. I can't figure out the correlation between the owner losing their franchise and the rest of the story. Why did they want to steal the sets? If they're really a $400M company (whatever that means), why would they do this over (at most) $200k?
I couldn't figure out what is being claimed here. I'm not saying it's not true, I just can't follow the story at all.
EDIT: After reading other sources, it seems that the franchise owed $200k to BAM (unrelated) and also made a deal with the Mansell's directly. And it seems like the parent company is saying the unsold sets have been returned but the money is theirs because the store owed them money, while the Mansells are (correctly) saying consignment means they own the sets, not the franchise. BAM crossed into definitively illegal territory when they continued to sell sets after the Mandells asserted they wanted their property back (as confirmed by a "sting" operation).
A man gave a store merchandise on consignment, signed a contract with the store manager.
The manager lost control of the store to corporate. The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
Corporate says, "this is mine now" and refuses to honor the contract. "It wasn't our name on it, says right here that the previous store manager signed this, and she's no longer with us." They sell the goods and keep all of the revenue, rather than just their 10% share.
It seems like theft, but it's a very common civil contract dispute. The side with possession and deeper pockets is the side with the leverage, sadly!
Corporate is also claiming that they don't allow stores to take on consignment deals, contrary to their franchise agreement explicitly allowing franchise owners to take on consignment deals.
I have absolutely no doubts a court would consider it impossible to transfer goods under consignment to a different entity free of the burden of the consignment contract. So the corporation trying to reach into the franchise to grab these goods without honoring the contract is absolute BS and they should be dragged through the mud over it.
The unfortunate loophole here is that, potentially, by shutting down that franchise in a bankruptcy the corporation may end up being preferred for being made whole on debts relative to the consigner. Bankruptcy is complicated so while I am pretty sure any remaining goods from the consignment would be returned to the original owner the proceeds from sales that were successfully made might end up in the pocket of the corporation.
Personally, I absolutely loathe consignment. It is an incredibly complex agreement with a lot of weird edge cases about deprecation of goods and the duty to seek a good price that get complex quick. If you have goods like this and can find a store that will buy your goods in bulk you should be very careful in considering how much you care about the price difference between that bulk price and the percentage they list for consignment. A single transaction is usually much cleaner and easier for both sides and in this case (trying to pay for medical costs) having the money immediately can be quite attractive.
If you look at the latest stuff from the previous owner where they recorded multiple conversations / pulled security footage... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0 1, they were allowed to do consignment deals, 2, when corporate took control, they said they'd take on the consignment liability, 3, BAM outright threatens them with making the legal process too expensive for them.
All of which contradicts the current corporate response
yeah, it’s plain as day they say blatantly they’ll take on the consignment.
the reckless ben youtube videos are pretty clearly laid out with contracts, video evidence, etc..
the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out until you’re broke from lawyers fees. we’re a lawyer rich corp and you’re not. they don’t even try to hide it.
bricks and minifigs are just crazy dickens movie tier evil it’s crazy.
Unfortunately this makes every Bricks and Minifigs store a risk to do business with, selling or buying. You're either supporting a criminal enterprise or risking being a victim of one.
"the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out "
To my experience this is a common strategy in disputes when the corporate party has people who operate as uncivilized brutes. I think it's part of the McKinseyfication of companies - profits at all cost - and here's the playbook.
My personal experience is from private parking control. Rather than be professional about my reclamation, their first response was "only criminals dispute these and we win all the court cases".
So I think trying to be imposing and villanous to scare the other non-corporate party to back off is a common global corporate playbook in situations in matters where companies enter contractual complex space with individuals.
Very rarely do corporations act like this once there’s any sort of spotlight on them. Especially over such a relatively small number. This is nothing to do with any standard corporate tactics and everything to do with the guys in charge being complete dick heads.
That has always been the goal. There is, has, and always will be a powerful caste system to ensure that they are gods and we are trash. "Stay in your lane" / "Know your place" / etc. have been watchwords for thousands of years.
yeah you cant just unilaterally cancel the contract in which you agreed to hold the goods for sale, and then take possession without any reimbursement.
You either need to pay the sales price of the consigned items, or just give them back.
If you do neither, its the same exact thing as theft. Which is what they did. They took possession of the 200k lego set with no reimbursement. Just plain ol' theft.
The police are under no obligation to provide service to specific people or businesses, only the public in general. They don’t even have to say “This is a civil matter”, they could just say “Eh, this doesn’t interest us, good luck with that.”
I’m late in responding, but yeah… No particular duty on the part of the police, including in the middle of someone killing you, and all (see the book “Dial 911 and Die”).
This is a dispute about who is the rightful owner of the Lego. That is a civil matter to be decided by the courts. Doesn't matter how clear the evidence, such disputes are for the courtroom.
Absolutely - and there are bad actors here that we should be mad at since they are abusing the law enforcement system but the default goal in situations should always be to de-escalate to prevent violence. I think the cops could have done a better job at explaining next steps and routes to approach a civil resolution but anyone objecting to the police officer removing Ben from the store property after a trespassing complaint doesn't understand how abusive it can be on the receiving end of stalking or harassment.
Separating parties in a civil dispute is always a good idea.
> I have absolutely no doubts a court would consider it impossible to transfer goods under consignment to a different entity free of the burden of the consignment contract.
Reminds me of the whole "disney must pay" debacle.
No, they came up with some legal theory in which they’d bought the assets of some company, including the company’s ownership of some art, but not obligations like paying royalties.
That’s like when I got my shower sealed and then it started leaking within the warranty period. The company claimed that they were the new owners and had purchased the business but not the warranty obligations (!) and I’d have to find the original owner and try to make him honour the warranty. Which was complete BS, obviously, but it wasn’t worth taking to court. :/
There actually are legal ways to do that… instead of buying the company, you start a new company, and just buy assets of the old company (e.g. phone numbers, web sites, trademarks, customer lists). Seems shady but apparently it’s pretty common.
Common doesn’t mean not shady. In Australia there are measures in place (eg. national registry for company directors, personal liability for directors) to combat this kind of ‘phoenixing’.
The problem with consignment is that the consignor wants the maximum price but the consignee wants a quick sale because 10% of a few bucks more means very little and they have to hold the inventory.
Selling on consignment can be an absolutely great deal for shops, under the right conditions.
If I'm a lego trader and I buy your set for $900 hoping to sell it later for $1000, in the meantime that's $900 I can't invest in anything else. And maybe I guessed the set's value wrong and I end up unloading it for $800, taking a loss.
On the other hand, if I agree to sell that same set on consignment? Zero capital outlay, zero risk of me taking a loss - just some shelf space and admin work.
Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
This is definitely not uniform. I worked on inventory management at Target, and stores had quite a lot of shelf space—to the point where we'd hold large amounts of cheap, non-perishable stuff like cat litter because, well, we had the space for it.
Stores also wanted to look full. We actually had parameters in our inventory management logic to increase inventory just for presentation reasons. If inventory is expensive, having some free, quality inventory can be valuable in and of itself even if it moves slowly.
Bricks and Minifigs stores are like 2000 square feet, much different than a Target. Their overhead per square foot is almost certainly far higher than Target.
If you have no shelf space, of course you can refuse the consignment. And this was a really big one, but the shop was initially very happy with it. Advertised widely with it. Brought in more shelves to display it all. From what I understand, it was a very large part of what was for sale in that shop.
I run a niche retail store and there are two sides to this.
Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.
In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.
Also, from the customer side, people ask at the higher end, don't they? Beyond a certain level, it's more of a search and a quest than just browsing. So you mainly have to show that you have connections for certain things. Why does this sound like drugs now?
I know this from a few friends who are deep into tabletop and boardgames, and they would regularly work with the one or two small stores around to get some special, expensive item (to help keep the shop afloat).
Yeah, in my experience the people who want niche stuff are willing to work with you and have a "high touch" experience. Where the people who want entry-level stuff want turn-key, sane defaults.
The annoying thing is people with lots of money and no experience who want the special expensive thing but they want it now and they don't know what options they want. I'm sure other fields are good at separating fools and their money but niche hobby retail isn't the Audi dealership, we're not just trying to upsell you for fun.
> In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
However, in this particular case, the legos were initially displayed as a customer attraction, and then kept in storage. Presumably there's still some inventory cost in storage, but the shelves are clear.
>> The collection will be on display in the store's party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere.
My wife owns a retail business where some part of their sales is consignment. Taking anything in with only a 10% consignment fee would be laughable, there’s no way that’s a money making deal when you account for all the overhead of a small retail store. My suspicion is the original store owner made a bad consignment deal to sell the Star Wars stuff with only a 10% commission and the new owner didn’t want to live up to it. Of course, at that point they should have just given it all back, but it turns out they’d rather be evil.
It isn't - deprecation of held goods is always a risk and if you're working on consignment then that comes with weird financial liabilities. If there's a flood and you lose your inventory it sucks - if there's a flood and you lose an inventory of consigned values then suddenly you're potentially exposed to paying market value for a number of items in addition to all the site damage you'll need to address. Capacity is one aspect of the costs of holding inventory - but breakage is the much more expensive consideration and consignment just makes it even more expensive.
a large part of the value of secondhand stuff is in the box and packaging, assuming those nice boxes in the image were from his collection - those are a little more fragile than the Lego pieces themselves.
Edit: wait, the whole collection was sealed and new in box. Yea, just water damage to those boxes would cut the value by at least 10%. Collectors are picky as shit.
They were sealed in box? Yeah you'd be right that damage would be easy and could significantly reduce the value.
I didn't realize people bought Lego to leave in the box. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because it's a common thing for collectors to do in other hobbies.
Even without the box I think you're underestimating how damaging water is. If you're experience a flood it's never distilled H20, sometimes it's sewage and that's just awful, but even if it's storm water or a broken water main the water isn't the difficult portion (though that alone can lead to all sorts of mold issues) it's the sediment. If that sediment is from brown water there are obvious biological hazards which may lead to destruction being the only economical resolution, but even if it's just mud and sand that forces a huge expenditure to actually clean the products and if there's a signficantly misaligned pH it may damage products that you otherwise think of as water resistant.
Given this was a set of full star wars legos with decades of age a lot of those bricks are already going to have degraded somewhat and technix style components are likely to be significantly damaged from internal sediment accumulation. If you drop your water proofed water in a stagnant pond for three weeks it's likely that the internal seal will hold up and protect the delicate components but you'll probably need someone to pull the glue or other sealant out and replace it as well as going over the exterior surface with cleaning solutions to get it back to the quality it was in before being submerged - and flooding is rarely an instantaneous affair.
I wouldn't underestimate just how damaging to goods storage can be - and if you're doing it at scale you're going to be paying that cost constantly just as a percentage of value stored.
Lego survives being eaten by babies and poop back out again (source: my younger brother). They also survive being left out at theme parks (ie the various Legolands) and primary schools under all weather conditions for months and years.
So I don't think I'm underestimating the resilience of Lego bricks to flooding.
There was an article a on HN a while back about the plastics chosen by Lego. They put an exceptional amount of time and effort into choosing durable materials for their bricks.
Only tangentially related, there was a "500-year" flood in my region a couple of years ago and a manager in my department who would shortly become the company president had his house flood. I volunteered to help with cleanup and ended up at his house tearing his basement, at one point 8' under water, down to the studs. His near-adult kids had small Lego collections that were basically in untouched condition except they had been under water. He told us to throw them out with everything else - it was not worth the complicated effort to do them and sort them out. But out of all the stuff it took us the most convincing to do so, the bricks weren't damaged at all.
That said, I'm surprised Lego survive outdoors. My understanding is that ABS is not UV-resistant.
I believe in this case the consignment contract requires the store to hold insurance on the consigned merchandise, which I assume is intended to address this concern.
Yup, if I worked in a field where consignment was an option I'd refuse to do it - it's a huge headache. So I'd absolutely believe that the corporation has a policy against accepting consignment offers and might have a case to recover damages or something against the original franchisee. But the way they've handled this situation still appears to be atrocious. Lets say you consigned 200k at a 10% commission, 50k sold under the original franchisee and you were paid 30k already. If the franchise transferred and the company wanted out there should be an exit[1] in the contract to pay the additional 15k and then return the goods to the original owner. I think it's important to remember this sort of an option was always on the table.
1. Even if the original consignment contract was poorly drawn up without a clear exit clause I think it'd be reasonable to expect a resolution somewhere close to this in mediation.
I have read that article and a few other sources since the first few ways I heard about this story were heavily biased. I have not yet seen B&M confirm that the contract that was leaked is genuine - it is incredibly unlikely that they would, of course, but it still remains one the facts in this case that I tenatively believe but have some reservations around.
I thought it was interesting to, from the assumption that the corporation actually banned consignments, still work through how it doesn't free them from wrong doing. Even in the best light B&M has acted in bad faith.
Your alternative is that the contract was forged. Something easily falsifiable in court and absolutely devastating to any case brought, not to mention any follow-on charges that may result. Is that what you're putting forward?
I thought I was very clear above - my alternative is that even under the best light there were still clearly bad actions carried out by bricks and minifigs. When there is a grey zone I find it helpful to work out what the most charitable interpretation if it is still negative. Even when given the biggest benefit of the doubt Bricks and Minifigs is clearly acting in bad faith here.
They can seize assets that belong to the entity. They can’t seize assets that belong to other people just because it happens to be on their premises, in the same way that they can’t seize and sell the cars that happen to be in a bankrupt store’s parking lot.
There are a lot of reasons why you should never sell things through consignment - but one of those reasons is that the goods cease to be yours in several significant ways. If a company is able to sell a good they could sell that good to fulfill debts - if it is a route to liquidate goods to cover debts then it's in the scope of the liquidator (though I think in most cases a sane liquidator would return the goods whole to avoid creating more debt than already exists and destroying non-fungible goods). If we assume the consignment sale was advantageous for the seller it's unlikely there's a way for the liquidator to quickly sell the goods in bulk for a better margin than the consignment contract offered so any sale they executed would likely add more debt than it cured.
"Can't" is a really bad word to use and I am not certain if "they" here are the corporation or the liquidator.
If you're talking about the corporation I think that any sensible neutral party would probably come down on the side that the corporation has no entitlement to those goods.
If you're talking about the liquidator then the goods were held by the franchise so if it went through bankruptcy those goods would be under consideration by the steward - I think they'd usually find that the original owner should be entitled to the goods since they're relatively non-fungible. The proceeds from sold goods are likely a more complicated answer since money is fungible and divisible. I could accept that there would be scenarios where a steward would think that the corporation should recover a portion of the proceeds.
> If you're talking about the liquidator then the goods were held by the franchise so if it went through bankruptcy those goods would be under consideration by the steward - I think they'd usually find that the original owner should be entitled to the goods since they're relatively non-fungible.
IANAA, but I'd say the situation is that while the goods are possessed by the franchise, but they are not owned by the franchise. Ownership title doesn't change until they're sold by the franchise to a buyer.
I could see a scenario in which the franchise contract says that BAM can automatically liquidate the franchise (and how else did BAM get immediate control of the store?), and BAM then says they've executed on that consignment contract (at perhaps not reasonable prices). But without a very well-documented paper trail that this is what they did, including actually paying the consignor the (low) proceeds of the sales, it would seem that the only other possibility here is some kind of criminal conversion.
Which points back to all of the discussion about consignment dynamics really being a red herring. The problem is a criminal conspiracy including by the police themselves, for whatever reasons that might be.
I think if the consignor has not taken the correct steps then there is a risk the receiver would be able to pay other secured creditors using the consignors assets. For example if there are other creditors with liens on the inventory then you are meant to take steps to notify them of your claims on the consigned goods because otherwise the consigned goods could look like inventory to the secured creditor (https://www.lowenstein.com/news-insights/publications/articl...)
bricks and minifigs is going to lose a hell of a lot more than this 10% in business
regardless of the law, it’s a very stupid move on the company’s part.
if they had half a brain they’d pay double the commission and pretend it aas internal miscommunication. $40k is cheap versus the pr hit they’re taking right now
I’ll make sure if I’m ever listing anything through a store via consignment that I remember to ask if the contract with their their franchiser allows consignment in the event that the franchisees folds. You know, typical stuff.
Corporate is lying a lot, and is pretty clearly guilty of theft at the very least.
The bigger problems I see here are:
1. You can't really sure large corporations like Bricks & Minifigs. They've got deeper pockets and can drag it out until you go bankrupt. There's no good legal recourse for this, meaning larger corporations can basically do whatever they want and ignore the law, as long as they only hurt people smaller than them.
2. The police refuses to treat this as the theft it is. There have been several confrontations with police that give a very strong impression that the police is corrupt and protecting the Bricks & Minifigs and its crimes.
3. Reckless Ben's questionable shenanigans seem to be the only way to fight for justice in unequal situations like this. The offending franchise is now closed. The victim still doesn't have his lego or money back, but thanks to Ben, Bricks & Minifigs is now also feeling the pain. Without that, they would have simply gotten away with it. Chance are they've done stuff like this before.
Also interesting are some of the stunts Ben has pulled:
1. Confronted with the claim that it's a civil matter, he tried turning it into a crime, by holding a raffle for one of the stolen sets that's still legally owned by the victim. The winner of the raffle went to pick it up, and was refused, making it theft from a lottery, which is a crime that the police is supposedly required to investigate (they didn't).
2. Several people buy $10k worth of lego from the victim and claim it from the shop. When they're refused, they go to small claims court, which is now possible because it's only $10k. Bricks & Minifigs ignored it and closed the shop instead. There are default judgements in favour of the people helping the victim, but there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce them.
3. He went out of his way to get the company to sue him, which is apparently better than him suing the company? I'm not sure why. But Bricks & Minifigs didn't bite.
The most effective thing has simply been the PR. The public attention may finally get law enforcement to investigate and punish Bricks & Minifigs. Or at least the broader public will know and avoid Bricks & Minifigs, so at least the company gets punished financially. That won't help the victim, but at least it would be some measure of justice.
#1 is a bluff. It would be really hard to drag it out and judges hate that. You are much more likely to end up paying the costs of the little guy as sanctions than bankrupting them or whatever.
This is also straightforward enough and enough evidence exists that it would be hard to drag it out.
You definitely can sue a large corporation and win or force a settlement. The “we’ll drag this out until you are bankrupt” thing is more bluff than reality. Courts do not react favorably to that. Especially when they have direct evidence of those threats.
A corporation may have a litigation cost advantage, but they’re still
going to spend more than the $180k or whatever that they owed to execute this drag it out forever strategy.
Corporate is lying all over the place. If you're following the story, you can see all the contradictions, let alone the video that came out today that literally needs a federal FBI investigation and internal affairs looking into the police department and the Church of Mormon corruption, which is shockingly overt in the video just released. Like I'm talking anti-American level of full city or state takeover corruption.
> this seems kinda obvious that if they dont have a contract to do consignment, they don't have a contract to the lego at all, and cannot sell the lego
The ancient adage unfortunately applies here still: Possession is 9/10ths of the law
The store in question was a franchise so potentially the liability will be limited to just the assets of that franchise. But there's a lot of weird stuff here and it looks like the corporation may have (in a legally questionable manner) removed assets from the store to the corporation during proceedings to shield them.
A representative of the corporation, while taking over the store, expressly states that the corporation is taking over the consignment agreement, on camera and with several witnesses.
They absolutely are and a good lawyer, I'm sure, could audit the accounts and find some misdeeds - the issue is that the auditing and even getting access to those records in court is extremely expensive. To my knowledge there isn't a way to trigger that kind of a discovery in small claims so you need to go through the pricey legal system.
The money in question here is the proceeds from selling a collection valued at 200k - the recovery (unless you start to get into punitive territory) is likely to be rather meager... and it's a large risk so there may be few bites on firms willing to take it on purely commission.
In the UK you can make an order of information to compel directors of a company that is in debt to answer questions about company assets, accounts and records under oath. This can be done in County Court and my understanding it is inexpensive. I'm not sure how useful this is for carrying out an audit because I think its meant to be used for seeing if the debtor has the ability to pay. I think generally incorrect trading during an insolvency is meant to be discovered by the receivers during the insolvency process. Also, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent to an order of information in the US system.
the issue is that the auditing and even getting access to those records in court is extremely expensive.
In most cases, the bankruptcy trustee will be doing that work already.
But in a case like this, it's probably not going to be necessary. Courts usually pierce the corporate veil in situations involving the debts of wholly-owned subsidiaries. It happens frequently enough that its actually news when they don't pierce the veil. This is because corporations usually do a bad job of doing all the things that are necessary to maintain the liability shield in court.
In a nutshell: it requires treating the subsidiary as an entirely separate entity, with separate books, accounts, back office, officers/management, etc. As this is extremely inefficient, most corporations don't bother. The only corporations that do are the ones that deal with company-killing litigation regularly enough that it's worth it to absorb the cost of maintaining the liability shield.
Somewhere in one of the long videos, they mentioned that there were unique stickers on each of his items that he was selling on consignment. They had to have known which items were his.
The original franchisee claims to have lost their life savings in that move. I have no idea how exactly that happened. Their story really sounds like something from Russia back when western investors had their company simply taken from them by someone well-connected.
It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.
That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.
* They had sold about half of the consigned inventory
* The old franchise owner said they had a job offer outside the country
* Said franchise owner was current on a restructured fee schedule that, they allege, was the direct result of corporate bungling the transfer of accounts from the franchise owner previous to them
I definitely heard 10% first and only later 35%. For some reason the videos don't have transcripts and the Gemini AI isn't available, so I can't try to search for it. But I'm 100% sure that 10% was the figure mentioned first (maybe I misunderstood and it was just being used as an example). If the real figure is 35%, then I retract any comments about them making a bad business deal.
From what I understand, the original franchisee wanted to sell the store because they wanted to leave the US (for "political reasons"; I suspect they don't want to live in Trumpland anymore, but that's pure speculation). The way it appears, the moment they announced that desire to sell, B&M corporate showed up to take control of the shop. And the consignment.
(sprinkle a bunch of IIRC's) You're glossing over the fact that they have continued to sell the items in spite of a cease and desist from the brick owners which makes them totally culpable of selling other people's property, and that they're also being sued for unfair termination because the managers were calling in good faith to let them know they were going to take a job abroad.
If the consignment contract was not legal then BAM never owned the goods and would not have had the right to sell them.
EDIT: as other commenters point out, BAM actually did lose the lawsuit over this and now the issue is the consigner is trying to collect the judgment. In that case it would normally be irrelevant that the store was a franchise location, because BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least). With deep pockets BAM could drag out the collections process long enough to try an extract a settlement from the consigner; the risk with doing so though is that interest accrues on the settlement at statutory rates that are normally higher than market rates and they face the possibility of court sanctions for any attempts at delay that have no reasonable legal basis.
>BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least).
Not necessarily and highly depended on how it was structured and state law. It's possible that BAM only took over entity and then all liabilities stays with the same entity (that was bankrupted later). Another option it was only asset sale without liabilities, etc.
Yes? Take the side of the person getting railroaded by a giant corporation, a bunch of corrupt cops, and a legal system that is built to protect the big, and milk the poor.
Whats the other side in this? Feel bad for the 400 million corp with their army of lawyers? Feel bad for the store owners who scammed the person and acted like a total dick? Honestly, whats your take on this?
The difference between you and the person you replied to is that, despite neither of you knowing what the other side is, the other person was curious to learn it instead of assuming they know everything and attacking.
> The police, for their part, kept calling it a "civil matter" and declining to investigate. Every single time.
On the other hand...
> In a subsequent conversation after the store closure and lawsuit loss, when Ben indicated the logical next step was to pursue Johnson personally, Josh's response, according to documented accounts, included the threat: "If you try to pursue me legally, YOU stole the LEGOs."
> Shortly after that conversation, someone called in a police report claiming Reckless Ben was transporting heroin.
This is a strange choice by Johnson, since it instantly transforms the civil dispute into a criminal offense.
Yeah, but you don't know the whole story. There was a young motorcyclists who ran from the police and killed in a crashed. His family has a go-fund me still just to collect money.
You should post the link to that. Police chases costing people’s lives is an awful thing, anybody that’s ever seen a cop driving 130mph because they think they’re Knight Rider might want to donate.
High speed pursuits are a severe public safety hazard at best and extrajudicial murder at worst. The municipalities that ban them do so under the notion that given a choice between not chasing someone and risking the lives of every passenger in the car, other motorists, the police, and pedestrians, not chasing them makes more sense legally. An officer seeing what they believe to be a busted tail light does not actually constitute sufficient cause to execute a pedestrian crossing the street eleven blocks away.
Forgive me if I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. I just read the linked blog and some of the links within, but I don't have time to watch all these long YouTube videos
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
The store says the full inventory was not discoverable at the store. They said the person gave a written statement in the past saying the collection was "moved off site for security reasons" so I don't think this is really as cut and dry as the YouTuber and blogger people are trying to make it look.
> Corporate says, "this is mine now"
Their statement says they located what inventory they could and offered it back.
I think there's a lot more to this story. I wouldn't really trust the YouTube influencers for the whole story.
Reckless Ben's video I would rank as one of the top 3 best YouTube videos I have ever seen.
I had never seen this guy before but this video was wild. It's a mix of reporting and trolling and questionable legal tactics.
The evidence in the video seems pretty hard to dispute. Of course there is 2 sides to everything but I strongly believe bam is the bad guy here.
The store (as managed by the second group) lost the suit, if they were negligent they still owe the consigner. What's missing is the relationship between the second group and the corporate parent. Seems there's some reason the liability from the lawsuit doesn't transfer to the corporation.
> The store (as managed by the second group) lost the suit, if they were negligent they still owe the consigner. What's missing is the relationship between the second group and the corporate parent.
This does seem like a very key point that keeps getting ignored for the sake of a simpler story.
Everyone keeps talking about this lawsuit loss, but what lawsuit? Against whom? The article doesn't even explain, but it's starting to look like the lawsuit was against the former owners, contrary to the ragebait "Bricks and Minifigs stole..." title
I haven't watched this particular video, but I've read her 46 page suit. That's not the case that was lost. The case(s) that were lost are small claims actions made by the YouTuber and 9 of his friends, essentially. They got default judgments from the court on 10 claims each worth $10k. The previous owner's suit was just filed in March of this year, I believe.
Now as for the previous question of who was at the pointy end of those default judgments, I haven't been able to find that answer. I assume they should have named the local franchise as an entity and it's owners individually. Closing the store to avoid paying is arguably a fraudulent transfer of assets, but that would need to be taken to court in an enforcement action.
Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood the suit the comment was referring to.
It is my understanding that BAM took direct ownership of the local store and therefore the small claims case was also directed against them, but at the moment I can't find where I've heard that so I'm not 100% sure.
According to the former store owner's lawsuit, and what comports with what I've seen in the original video, the store was seized by corporate and then sold quickly to the owners of the Eugene, OR BAM store.
They lost default judgements because they did not appear. Either they thought it was fake or they thought they'd lose, but they were served and did not appear.
Or they thought that the losses were acceptable to avoid having to make sworn statements about the series of events that are still at issue in the previous owner's case and some events that may very well still be charged by Oregon prosecutors.
Quantum physics guarantees us anything is a possibility. The question is, is it a likely one at all? And the overwhelmingly likely reasons are obvious to anyone with half a brain, given all the surrounding context here.
While this is true at the moment, closing a store and transferring its assets to another store owned by the same people could reasonably be alleged to be fraudulent transfer. The owners don't just get to keep whatever was in the store because they closed it before they paid.
I believe they would need to dissolve the business entity. These default judgments against them should count as debt that needs to be paid before the business is closed unless they declare bankruptcy in court and not like Michael Scott.
A default judgement is still a loss. Why would not they not fight back small claims cases, which would be trivially easy for someone with their resources, if they could win?
They can't even serve papers because they're being relentlessly harassed by Police who have immediately banned them from serving them. In part 2, cops even verify the court case and he has a process server-- but they just refuse to. One of many different cops eventually took the papers to serve them, and ended up coming back saying "he didn't want them."
Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.
I am not stating that I think B&M would win. B&M's original intent was to force Ed and Ben into a pyrrhic victory via dragging out one lawsuit, even if they lost that one suit.
Without being able to run up Ed/Ben's legal costs, trying to defend these suits at all is just a further loss for B&M for no benefit.
I don't think it was the deciding factor, but Ben also sent a fake Guinness award to the store around the same time they were being served. It is within the realm of possibility that they thought Ben was bluffing with the lawsuits and tried to call his bluff just to find out it was all real after they failed to appear.
Nah, the whole Guinness thing was obviously just a bit for the video. Clearly the franchise would not fall for that, when you can easily check that you were summoned to small claims (and they also probably get some form of direct communication from the court I would guess).
Legal costs for a small claims suit is tiny, and would be easily doable for them if they could win it. Again, there is a reason they lost those cases.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. But also please watch the video, they submitted multiple separate claims via different aggrieved parties, this totaled $100k, despite the low individual small claims maxima.
You go around claiming the accusations are "just needless YouTube drama" and that you "wouldn't really trust the YouTube influencers for the whole story". If you think this is not defending the company, then you have some basic communications difficulties.
Again, if this is your knowledge after looking it up, then refrain from commenting, as your intelectual limitations will inevitably lead you to make false claims.
I used to sometimes do consignment with artistic products I made, and 80% of the time I ended up being jerked around by the store. Even stores that kept good records and paid for a while would, after a few years, end up with inventory left that they never returned or paid for. Sometimes the stores would close and disappear with the inventory. Other times they’d avoid me. Sometimes they’d insist they paid for everything already, and have done such a poor job of documenting what payments were for that it was difficult to tell. Some people just straight up ran their stores like Ponzi schemes - paying off old consignment with sales from new vendors. As an individual artist, I became very wary of consignment as it’s essentially an unsecured loan. Even worse was that some people who faded away and kept inventory were friends and good business partners, and it’s not like I would sue them for $400.
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
This appears to be in dispute.
As per bricks and minifigs:
>It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
>A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition.
It appears they are alleging that the prior operator had sold a larger portion of the consigned goods than they had claimed to the family.
From what I can see: Franchisee entered into a consignment agreement to sell the lego. They were not allowed to do that, so corporate took over the franchise.
BUT rather than unwind the agreement and return the lego, they just kept it. Argued for it to be dealt with legally. It was, they lost, so they closed down the store rather than return the lego.
Incorrect as the article points out with an image of the contract:
> However, it was brought to my attention by site user @luddevig that Chrystal Law, the Bricks & Minifigs Salem-Keizer store's original owner, was able to pull the franchise agreement between her and and the B&M Corperation, that clearly states that consignment is allowed.
They hired a PR firm that was looking at the base case and those averages. As Nassim Taleb points out, we live in Extremestan. No idea what the value was of the Bricks and Minifigs, but I'd be shocked if it hasn't dropped by 2 or 4 million dollars. Their biggest moat was their reputation.
According to the former franchise owner this is a lie from corporate and they were indeed allowed to sign consignment agreements. They showed a contract that says as much as evidence.
Frankly even if the store was on breach of its consignment agreement, that seems like a case corporate would have against the prior owner (and one it would be hard to prove damages in), but not one that would give them any rights to the property of the lego collection owner.
We really need an eccentric billionaire going around trolling all sorts of petty legal trolling. Ben is actively making the world a better place with this, and every person with a networth worth a damn is barely a toenail the man he is.
I didn't know Ben dealt with cults until he revealed he started the "Scientology Sucks" religion, but as soon as the cops started baiting him into agreeing they had cause for arrest, I instantly guessed he had completely accidentally walked right into another cult corruption video. If I had a penny for the amounts of times I saw this exact type of cult discovery happen, I'd have 4, which is a pattern -> ALL cults are corrupt.
I read about this previously and had the same reaction - something seems missing, it’s too crazy, this has gotta be just one side of the story. Normal reaction in this media landscape. But this seems to be one of the rare cases that, yes, it really is a case of an edge case of law allowing theft.
I believe they think they can get away with it because they have before. This family is linked to a company called Legally Mine, which specializes in legally stealing from people in any way they can, even potential clients. It's insane.
You seem to be all over this thread trying to defend the company LOL Are you B&M corporate? If they have such a solid case, why did they lose the small claims lawsuits?
If you insist on not watching the "really long youtube videos" youll unfortunately have to settle for taking our word for it
There were 10x small claims cases against i believe the single franchise (L2 Bricks LLC iirc) which were won by default and might not stick due to them going chapter 11
You'd think that if there was a side of the story where the details exonerated the company, you'd think they would share those details. If they moved someone else's property out of the store, then surely they would be able to share evidence supporting this.
All we have to go by is the blogger's account, so that's the story. Just saying "there must be more to it" without evidence that there is more to it, is just vague speculation.
One discrepancy is that B&M says consignment was against their operating instructions, yet the former franchisee shared the franchise contract, which explicitly allowed it.
And that's the reason I won't. You can see yourself how insanely easy it is to find this info (you replied with one you probably found pretty quickly yourself), and yet these people who are full of quickly-formed opinions are constantly trying to offload the work onto others.
Beyond glaring omissions such as that one there's conflicting information between the linked article and what commenters here say the various linked videos contain. The article also lacks the necessary level of detail regarding the various legal claims, counterclaims, and entities involved which in this case are absolutely essential to understanding what's actually going on.
I'm inclined to believe that there's corporate wrongdoing but the piece itself comes across as a blatant attempt to stir up drama as opposed to objectively informing the reader. It's certainly not the sort of thing I come to HN for.
I can't see any real motivation for it either. The sequel trilogy was so safe over all, that the state of the universe is almost identical post episode 6 and 9. The only thing a retcon would accomplish for mainline media is free up some specific characters tied to actors who are way too old to play them anymore or literally passed away (please tell me there will not be a de-aged Mark Hamill film Disney). If you want to do Thrawn movies you can just do it post 9, nothing really changes. If remotely true I feel like this is a corrupted version of "we're going to re-canonize the EU stuff as an alternate timeline as a mea culpa fan appeasement?"
Article: "It only showed the spam to Googlebot, making it invisible to site owners." - so it was really only about SEO for themselves or their customers.
With regards to "Your Ad Here" type services using crypto: are Adshares, Coinzilla, Bitmedia or A-Ads any good? Perhaps micropayments are what makes this space interesting right now.
I suppose it's the "unsavory" aspect of the things being peddled that can make it hard/expensive to get visible inbound links.
Article: "It resolved its C2 domain through an Ethereum smart contract, querying public blockchain RPC endpoints. Traditional domain takedowns would not work because the attacker could update the smart contract to point to a new domain at any time."
I wonder if that scheme be used for anything positive, like avoiding censorship? That's pretty important if you are sharing information about new inventions around, say, free energy as an antidote to cost-of-living and the "scourge of AI."
I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.
Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.
The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.
We started using "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" as our technical interview, and people _love_ it. They get really into it and have fun. It's pretty easy to do inefficiently, and it's great to watch people build on it and try to improve their scores.
It has two benefits: 1/ everyone clearly understands the problem 2/ people see it as fun rather than a drag.
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