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Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

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Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#301
post #297

Why is white collar crime punished with such light sentences? I could have got that sentence for house breaking, or shoplifting to the value of $5k. I could get a lot more for dealing drugs to a few friends. Steal $100m and get 18 months, starting when the world is a nicer place. The world really is set up for rich people.

For any non-violent crimes we should not send people to prison. I don't even know why it became a criminal matter. Civil courts can do that job really well. If we prosecute everyone who took information from the previous job, then there will no sales people left. I don't know any SaaS sales person who doesn't take their sales funnel with them.

That would mean that rich people could just do non-violent crime without any real consequences. The risk to be caught is way too small to outweigh the rewards of those crimes. It would still be a benefit for them in the long term.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lebron James was the exact definition of right place, right skills, right time. Lots of players have "tremendous talent" and "tremendous commitment." Lebron wouldn't be what he is today without a tremendous amount of luck. Would his career have worked out if Carmelo was drafted to Cleveland and Lebron went to the Nuggets? What about if Lebron needed to do a year in college now? How would that have impacted his trajec…

I don't think this is a great example. LeBron James has once in a generation physical gifts. It is not true that lots of players have the physical talent that LeBron has. With those gifts, he is going to go pro in a major sport and probably be a standout in most situations. I think his success is pretty independent of luck and time.

Having once in a generation physical gifts is a huge amount of luck.

Most people have to cope with mediocre physical gifts that no amount of training will fix.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#303
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bonuses in the millions Hundreds of millions. As part of breaching his employment agreement by stealing trade secrets, Levandowski had to pay back one of his bonuses, which was $120 million . I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. How much more should Google have paid to retain him? Or was this even preventable?

God what kind of knowledge / training do I need to get that level of bonus?

Sociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder on top of average skills.

My career took off when I had a particularly bad metal break where I exhibited both to a frightening degree. When I got over those I just retired with all the money I'd made.

Make no mistake, success is a mental illness.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely Levandowski has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as is evident by his founding The Way of The Future , which is his own church to worship artificial intelligence.

In all seriousness: You shouldn't remote diagnose mental illnesses for anybody. It's totally frowned upon by psychiatrists and psychologists, who are experts in the field, because it's actually impossible and can do a lot of damage. This has nothing to do with Levandowski not being a full blown greedy asshole and now a criminal too. But the problem is really that doing that can potentially hurt people with mental iss…

> In all seriousness: You shouldn't remote diagnose mental illnesses for anybody.

As a counterargument: I am extremely annoyed by the people who publicly criticize the personal traits of others without even considering that they might be affected by a mental disorder.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that the "he deserves it, it's all foresight and brilliance" is the leading reply and the "right skills, right time" reply is behind. I imagine just by sheer nature of the power law that some upvotes are people trying to justify their lot but that would be the minority of people. I guess just so many who haven't made it at all but hold this fiction dear for their own peace of mind?

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

Yes and there's no socialist country that has produced Amazon, Google, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX to name a few. This platform, keyboard, routers in the middle are all US made. And there's a good reason for that

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#306
post #297

Why is white collar crime punished with such light sentences? I could have got that sentence for house breaking, or shoplifting to the value of $5k. I could get a lot more for dealing drugs to a few friends. Steal $100m and get 18 months, starting when the world is a nicer place. The world really is set up for rich people.

For any non-violent crimes we should not send people to prison. I don't even know why it became a criminal matter. Civil courts can do that job really well. If we prosecute everyone who took information from the previous job, then there will no sales people left. I don't know any SaaS sales person who doesn't take their sales funnel with them.

What's your definition of non-violent? I think the following bad behavior deserves jail time:

Signal man distracted on TikTok causes train crash

Fraudster electronically steals retirement savings

Pedophile gets child to do stuff over the internet

Driver repeatedly drives drunk, though never hits anyone

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#307
post #149
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God what kind of knowledge / training do I need to get that level of bonus?

This is the Google version of winning the lottery. Right place, right skills, right time.

But compared to the lottery, the skills needed to exploit the right place and the right time are not trivial to learn.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bonuses in the millions Hundreds of millions. As part of breaching his employment agreement by stealing trade secrets, Levandowski had to pay back one of his bonuses, which was $120 million . I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. How much more should Google have paid to retain him? Or was this even preventable?

Except that in his case the bonus was paid based on Project Chauffeur hitting certain milestones. They retained him until the project hit the milestones, and then he left. Which is fair and square. And by the way, Chris Urmson and Sebastian Thrun did the same. It's just that Google did not understand the Goodhart law of self driving, which states that you can hit arbitrarily hard milestones and yet get nowhere near r…

Has anyone seen any good hard milestones that would validate that self driving progress is being made? Even the framework?

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip-side of this truism is that this point of view is probably healthier for the individual than seeing themselves as helpless victims. Both views are flawed, of course.

> The flip-side of this truism is that this point of view is probably healthier for the individual than seeing themselves as helpless victims. That's not the flip side of that view, because the socialist view of an exploited proletariat in an advanced industrial democracy is not one of “helpless victims”, but of a powerful force that has the power to reverse the power structure once they realize it exists and act in…

> socialist view of an exploited proletariat is one of...a powerful force

May be mistaken, but historically didn't socialist view proles as a 'lumpen mass', with no real power?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely Levandowski has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as is evident by his founding The Way of The Future , which is his own church to worship artificial intelligence.

In all seriousness: You shouldn't remote diagnose mental illnesses for anybody. It's totally frowned upon by psychiatrists and psychologists, who are experts in the field, because it's actually impossible and can do a lot of damage. This has nothing to do with Levandowski not being a full blown greedy asshole and now a criminal too. But the problem is really that doing that can potentially hurt people with mental iss…

This seems like good advice. Amateur diagnosis of mental syndromes seems to happen a lot these days.

It raises an interesting question though. Every time narcissism / NPD comes up, the general advice seems to be that you should stay they hell away from these people. There seems to be plenty of evidence that they can wreak havoc on the lives of people around them, particularly anyone in an intimate relationship with them.

So it's arguably a good idea to learn how to "diagnose" these people, at least for self-preservation.

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