Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 783 posts

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#241

Post by dlgeek »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #167
andrewstuart wrote: post #16

Having read the whole thing, man Jeff Bezos has a great deal of courage. It helps to be backed by untold wealth but here is a guy who stands tall in the face of ghastly behaviour and in the face of deep personal embarrassment. +1 Bezos.

I'm going to push back against this characterization as "ghastly personal behavior". For one, it's not clear if he and his wife were already separated, at least at a personal level, before this affair. But this general idea that it's somehow "ghastly" to send a paramour love notes and sexually suggestive pictures is a sad remnant of our puritanical history, and the sooner we rid ourselves of this notion, the better.

I think GP's "ghastly behaviour" (seems like you inserted the "personal" unless it was an edit?) is referring to AMI rather than Bezos.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#242

Post by dmode »

davidw wrote: post #186
cromwellian wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the people downvoting this (presumably Trump supporters), that AMI admitted guilt in attempting to influence the 2016 by using their well known tactics to snub a story damaging to the candidate, and that their plea agreement stipulates that they would no longer commit anymore crimes, and that by blackmailing Bezos, they're essentially broken their plea agreement? This is the very definition of a criminal enterpri…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#243

Post by inopinatus »

alasdair_ wrote: post #204
inopinatus wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Principle of Least Regret" is an excellent way to make decisions, particularly binary ones: Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets? You then commit to the path that you currently judge minimises your future contrition. The very literal minded will ta…

>Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets? One practical issue with this advice is that it can lead to the "death of a thousand cuts" where any single binary event can be weighed one way but over the course of thousands of iterations, the aggregate would be…

That hasn't been a problem in practice. What you're describing makes it sound like The Dice Man, but decision regret hasn't turned out to be an aggregate function. Under the POLR framework each past decision becomes a sunk cost; each committed decision is the new baseline.

On the other hand I tend only to apply it for substantial life decisions. Quitting my job to launch a startup; getting married; moving to another country (x4); not eating the entire cheesecake; choosing Vim over Emacs etc.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#244

Post by bayesian_horse »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Important note: This is written by Jeff Bezos himself . Normally, the Bezos affair story would be gossipy, but this alleges extortion , extraordinarily. (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

Apparently it's not a clear cut case of extortion, because no money is exchanged. A "thing of value" may do, but it's not clear that AMI's demands rise to that level.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#245

Post by kerng »

optimiz3 wrote: post #239
Balgair wrote: post #15

Whatever you think about Jeff, this is the correct way to handle such things. We should all have the same character in such a situation (despite how the situation arose; in this case via an affair). Jeff has MANY other issues of moral disfortitude (we all do to some degree, though not at these scales). However, this particular event is to be applauded and emulated.

Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon/Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer's digital assets for forensic purposes. https://twitter.com/ryanhuber/status/1093665718464327680

I'm not sure if you are joking, but that's exactly what they should not be doing. They also can't just go poke around their customer's data. That would be very unwise...

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#246

Post by patrickg_zill »

apo wrote: post #227

Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy. President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certa…

Bezos essentially got paid by the CIA to buy the WashPost ($600 million contract from the CIA, next thing you know, Bezos buys the paper).

Let's not kid ourselves about his altruism - the purpose of owning a large paper like the Post is political power... this has been true since at least the time of Lord Beaverbrook.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#247

Post by optimiz3 »

kerng wrote: post #245
optimiz3 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon/Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer's digital assets for forensic purposes. https://twitter.com/ryanhuber/status/1093665718464327680

I'm not sure if you are joking, but that's exactly what they should not be doing. They also can't just go poke around their customer's data. That would be very unwise...

Well come on - don't host your business on a company you plan on antagonizing. Pretty sure AWS has contract clauses that allow them to deny service or perform forensics when criminal activity is suspected, and blackmail would certainly qualify.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#248

Post by ElijahLynn »

imgabe wrote: post #222
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Important note: This is written by Jeff Bezos himself . Normally, the Bezos affair story would be gossipy, but this alleges extortion , extraordinarily. (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

Yeah but why Medium? Surely he could throw up a static site in an S3 bucket...

Medium has reach.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#249

Post by ph0rque »

inopinatus wrote: post #243
alasdair_ wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets? One practical issue with this advice is that it can lead to the "death of a thousand cuts" where any single binary event can be weighed one way but over the course of thousands of iterations, the aggregate would be…

That hasn't been a problem in practice. What you're describing makes it sound like The Dice Man, but decision regret hasn't turned out to be an aggregate function. Under the POLR framework each past decision becomes a sunk cost; each committed decision is the new baseline. On the other hand I tend only to apply it for substantial life decisions. Quitting my job to launch a startup; getting married; moving to another…

> not eating the entire cheesecake (x100 a year)

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#250

Post by busterarm »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #223
dahfizz wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real. He earned much more than half.

His wife supported him after he left his IB job to start Amazon. Amazon would not be without her in all probability. I argue Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support. https://www.wired.com/story/mackenzie-bezos-amazon-lone-geni...

Jeff's parents supported him when he left his hedge fund job at D.E. Shaw. He was a quant and he had been there 4 years. He left his bonus on the table when he left but he was extremely well paid. He wasn't exactly hurting for cash.

It's already well established fact that Jeff's/Amazon's costs in the early days were paid for with his parents' life savings.

Post reply on HN