Earlier quoted context omitted.
the need for offense is strong with this one, yes?
not here to people please, just being authentic.
keepin' it real!
Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
301–310 of 311 posts
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this sums up not just big cooperate, but large part of our society in general as well. ( May be a bigger problem in US than other parts of the world, but still a problem ) I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?
Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo. Especially on this site where a lot of people seem to take a weird pseudo-detached outlook. Trying to analyze things in an almost entirely emotionless judgement free manner. I think this is seen by people as enlightened. Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached ana…
Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo
It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.
For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.
This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".
To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might be wrong, but I don't think there's any law that forbids having consensual sex with employees. It's unethical if they're his direct reports, sure, but I don't think it's illegal. I'm sure if I had _fifty billion dollars_, I'd have to fight off women like zombies in a movie even though I'm already married.
Consent is murky at best when there's a large power discrepancy between two co-workers. See: everything that's been going on with Hollywood in the past couple of years
The law has no concept of "large power discrepancy" affecting the notion of whether sex is legal or not, if there's no violence or force involved.
The attempts in recent years by a small group of feminists to broaden the definition of non-consensual sex to include "I had sex with that rich guy because he could give me an attractive job but later regretted it" just degrades everything, especially women. It causes people to stop believing them when they say they were coerced by a powerful man. After all, Weinstein's accusers settled, didn't they? And his ex employers picked up the legal bills. Rumoured to be because he had tons of evidence that the complainants had willingly accepted their side of the "deals" and that such arrangements were commonplace throughout the industry.
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this sums up not just big cooperate, but large part of our society in general as well. ( May be a bigger problem in US than other parts of the world, but still a problem ) I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?
I can give the cynical answer to that. Being correct is a lousy strategy for social creatures, and making the best decision within the limits of what a person knows is a nearly guaranteed way to lose out to someone who takes risks. In that context, realists are not encouraged by the broader society. Better to be surrounded by and encouraging of irrepressible optimists, they explore more and are more likely to try to…
That to me is optimist are taking the VC route and growing at all cost. Realist are tacking the DHH route and simply just grow.
I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.
I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He probably had them sign something before the "massage" or else I'm sure we'd see some lawsuits. This sounds quite unlikely.
Why? That's exactly what a playboy billionaire should ask his sexual partners to do in year 2020 when consent can be "withdrawn" retroactively and a male is considered guilty unless proven otherwise.
Why would you ever sign one of those?
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? That's exactly what a playboy billionaire should ask his sexual partners to do in year 2020 when consent can be "withdrawn" retroactively and a male is considered guilty unless proven otherwise.
Why would you ever sign one of those?
Go get boned by a playboy billionaire I suppose? Why do people sign prenups? A better question is, would you, if you were a billionaire, risk having sex with someone you don't know all that well unless you can 100% incontrovertibly prove there was consent?
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you ever sign one of those?
Go get boned by a playboy billionaire I suppose? Why do people sign prenups? A better question is, would you, if you were a billionaire, risk having sex with someone you don't know all that well unless you can 100% incontrovertibly prove there was consent?
Typo: "go" -> "to"
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#308I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing. This was after Drummond was called out publicly for abandoning his kid he had with a subordinate: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-c...…
> it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person. Did he commit a fireable offense while on the job? It's not an employers responsibility or right to dismiss someone for conduct in their personal life.
Fucking your reports is not your personal life. It's your professional life. It opens both you and your employer to professional liability.
Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain.
If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Err I think you have that back to front? It's Syria that is mostly destroyed and has millions of refugees. Libya is bad but not quite as bad. I agree with your point that there is degrees of destruction though.
Yes they both have produced lots of refugees. The Bosporus is easier to cross than the Mediterranean, so more Syrian refugees have ended up in Europe. Lots of people died and had their lives destroyed in both wars. The Syrian conflict, even though it started later than that in Libya, is at this point largely winding down except for one location in which "rebels" still remain. The recognized sovereign government maint…
I'm not trying to underplay the Libyan situation at all, but do you have any evidence that it's worse than Syria?
They both started in 2011. The Syrian conflict maybe winding down, but has started a new phase (in Syrian Kurdistan).
Syria had slave markets too.
The UNHCR data[1][2] shows a lot more refugees from Syria than Libya (don't forget Libya is often used by refugees from other parts of Africa as their outgoing port to Europe, so news reports on refugees arrivals from Libya don't mean the refugees were Libyan).
One source on the Wikipedia article claimed 1/3 of the Libyan population had fled to Tunisia. This seems non-credible: Neither Tunisia nor any refugee agency makes this claim. [3] claims "there are 2 two million Libyans abroad, mostly in Tunisia", but this is still less than half the number of Syrian refugees (over 5 million) and less than the number of registered in Turkey alone (over 3 million).
I think your "That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there" statement is also unfounded - in Syria journalists were targets of both ISIS and the Syrian state, and frequently murdered by either of them.
[1] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria
[2] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/lby
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2015/03/17...
Re: Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please keep the "terrible person" trope off HN. The online call-out culture is good for shaming and indignation, but it wrecks curious conversation. Here we want curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Does this extend to conversations about Trump as well?
Two answers. First: sure it does. It's not about the person, it's about ourselves and what things like personal attacks do to the community [1].
The second answer is more pragmatic: in practice, it's much easier to simply ask "please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar" [2]. Everyone understands that. If we say "please don't do personal attacks" or "please don't do online shaming" about a major political figure, people mistake that for an expression of political support and object sharply. It's not worth the confusion, and I only have so much energy for explaining that it doesn't mean we're Trump supporters or communists or whatever.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...