This is the truth.
Total Cost = Cost to acquire data ($200,000) + Back pay to employees ($20,000,000)
Total Cost = Cost to acquire data ($200,000) + Back pay to employees ($20,000,000)
I predict that the Golden years of FB and Google are right now, they will slowly head into a plateau
As for Facebook, I think anyone who ever had a positive opinion of them should be evaluated by a psychiatrist.
You clearly don't understand what a manager does if you believe what they do isn't work.
But then again, managers are very skilled at power games, and the ultimate sign of power is taking credit for what your subordinates produced.
The terms "Googley" and "Googler" quickly became the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me thanks to these people.
I would. Where do I sign up?
IMO both of them are already on a plateau. Google keeps abandoning products, Facebook keeps buying promising startups and quietly shuts them down (Google does it too). In Google this mostly happens due to some weird geekdom culture / peer pressure thing (coding hipster-ism?), and in Facebook it's more like "we want to conquer the world".
Both companies' strategies are not sustainable. The world is already catching up and I suspect that now it's time for suing the hell out of everybody who isn't sharing their vision while being even slightly competitive to them (opinion, not a fact, no evidence for that, don't kill me).
One only needs to follow recent HN for news about decentralization efforts and slightly increased amount of articles about self-hosting to understand that a good part of the tech world is getting fed up with Google and Facebook.
Please tell me that your focus on "contracts" doesn't mean you are a sincere, "omg the right to contracts" libertarian?
No .. I just understand that's how most Western legal jurisdictions work.
Hadn't considered the compensation claim aspect but surely it could be argued it's just an emergent pattern - not as a result of any policy decision?
Would be a very interesting test-case ...
If/when the government does that, I think 2 things happen:
1. the government announces some punitive action against Google; things they must do, things they must pay, etc;
2. the probability of every Jane, Jill, and Hillary who worked for Google winning a wage discrimination case skyrockets, at least some workers file such cases or enter negotiations to settle such discrimination.
The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 means (pardon my rough summarization) that a worker can sue over discriminatory pay even if the discrimination / 'lost' wages occurred a while ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act_o...
Can we please focus on rational arguments instead of insults and ad hominems? This country needs much more rational discussion (like the previous comments) and much less name-calling.
On the meta-discourse level: is it appropriate to make fun of a belief that one honestly believes is Bad if I don't say that person X holds that belief and hence is bad?
In my public schooling, I had two year-long classes about the structure and function of the United States government. One was in middle school and one was in high school; I was not required to take any course on the subject as part of undergrad. Neither course taught me much more about courts than that the Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal and interprets the Constitutionality of laws.
Courts are complicated and laws and regulations are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but there are some fundamental, low-level principles that apply to proceedings across most (possibly all?) courts in the US. An educated citizenry in the US would, ideally, have at least some exposure to these fundamentals; these basic principles (which would include at least a little on contracts) are too important for the vast majority of the population (i.e. almost all non-lawyers) to not understand.
I told a lawyer friend about this idea and she strongly agreed. She said that her sister had taken an undergrad class which roughly fit my description-- "pre-pre-law" was how she described it. Her sister's evaluation of the course was that it's description of legal principles and their operation in courts helped explain a lot of the mechanics of how government, private institutions, and society function.
Still, people should be less sensitive on the internet.
[2] Most educated adults, including me, are not lawyers and so do not know precisely when a contract is or is not enforceable, because the legal system is complex and arcane. This is distasteful to many because anyone who takes himself as an authority on what is just/unjust/moral/immoral is naturally liable to feel they should therefore be an authority on what is legal/illegal (since legality is intended to codify justice and morality or something like that). I suspect that many contracts-uber-alles-like sentiments (some of which I have entertained myself from time to time) stem from this unconscious yearning to know a priori what is legal or enforceable.
In such cases, the sentiment is not rational, nor is it a tactic for the pursuit of self interest.But I was given to thinking property law and contract law were the fundaments of US law too?
A contract based on lies is fraud.
The information asymytry here is huge. It's worse than a sleazy car salesman showing a customer a doctored blue-book to inflate the price of an old junker.