191–200 of 548 posts
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A dictatorship like China raising the issue over Tibet is the equivalent of (an alternative universe) powerful Nazi Germany getting someone fired in the U.S. over liking a tweet about Jewish rights issue.
WOW that escalates quickly. I thought the Americans liked capitalism.
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I didn't say they were the same, or even equivalent.
> Which democracy are we talking about? China? The US? You made an equivalency without explicitly stating that they were the same or equivalent. The equivalency you made was that both China and the US could be mistaken for democracies, when in truth only the US could be mistaken for a democracy (since it is a representative democracy). China is well known to practice authoritarian rule by law through Communist Party…
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This is also why people in France have stable, long-term jobs, instead of being fired by Wallmart every 6 months due to some war veteran scheme that allows them to save 0.1% on employee salaries. In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company. The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. Fo…
A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is bette…
A lot of American workers are on short-term contracts, too, for nearly the same reasons.
> Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
The risk that it will go out of business is part of working for a startup. It doesn't make sense to punish the rest of us to save a handful of startup employees.
The meat of the story is that Omaha man worked for Marriott hotels on customer support. Their support system allows their agents to like tweets. The man appears to have inadvertently clicked like on a tweet while dealing with a large influx of support messages (due to a promo going on) thanking Marriott for listing Tibet as its own country which was a huge no-no due to Mariott's presence in China. Execs fire him as a…
The real story is he has no employment rights because he's in America and he's "at will." They can dismiss him because they don't like his lunch selection that day and he has no rights. That's at will employment. This type of situation plays out all over the country everyday.
Read the section on the threats Marriott got. China barred Marriot from making online bookings for a week. China would have done everything in their power to make sure someone was going to suffer for Roy’s mishap.
At-will employment would have changed little about Roy’s situation vs a huge international political bully.
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The real story is he has no employment rights because he's in America and he's "at will." They can dismiss him because they don't like his lunch selection that day and he has no rights. That's at will employment. This type of situation plays out all over the country everyday.
And yet all I see on HN is talk about how hiring a single false positive is supposedly so calamitous that it's better to reject (and waste the time of, and insult) tens, hundreds, or even thousands of false negatives.
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>Any kind of extra-legal and arbitrary "making an example" of a company domestically would be disastrous to confidence in the market. The market is in place to serve the country, not the other way around. Corporate charters are given by government and can be revoked. Colluding with a foreign country that we have a strained relationship with should be grounds for at least looking at the company much more closely.
It's unfortunate that countries do increasingly exist to serve markets. In my opinion that's a real inversion, although subtle, that's been taking place. Which leads us to a bought political system, at the moment at least.
Some would say it has always been bought, because markets are made to serve people (some of those people may have different governments), and the people running the markets will use that leverage over others in varying degrees…
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> Which democracy are we talking about? China? The US? You made an equivalency without explicitly stating that they were the same or equivalent. The equivalency you made was that both China and the US could be mistaken for democracies, when in truth only the US could be mistaken for a democracy (since it is a representative democracy). China is well known to practice authoritarian rule by law through Communist Party…
Right. It's a good thing that the US has two drastically different major political parties and not just one like China.
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A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire. Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is bette…
Startups are a form of volatile research projects that could be done better in a corporate environment. Startups provide precarious and unstable employment, and on average they fail and lead to unemployment. I personally love working on new, potent ideas, but this is not a viable model of development for society. "Gig economy" is getting out of control, and it's better to kill the startups than to let people abuse th…
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Not sure what your point is, if you have no money, you are screwed whatever the country.
In a similar situation, many US startups survive, after laying off of their half their at-will employees. That's my point.