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Comment by jasonsync | Hacker News Reader

At the most basic level "don't bite the hand that feeds you" seems like the main takeaway from this story.

A long time ago I did an internship at a marketing firm that did work for Subway Sandwiches. As such, it was considered a fireable offence to bring any other branded "sub" into the office.

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>As such, it was considered a fireable offence to bring any other branded "sub" into the office.

Ugh. That's just so stupid. What if they do work for a bank, automobile manufacturer, clothing designer, etc? Are the employees obliged to then buy new clothes, cars, hide their branded debit cards in the cafeteria?

Haha. In realistic terms they simply wanted to avoid that awkward moment. Although, if you work for GM, and exclusively drive a Toyota, would you feel pressured into switching at some point?

Edit - to answer my own question I searched Google and found this: http://jalopnik.com/dear-car-companies-stop-punishing-employ...

I think that totally depends how high you are in the company and whether you're client facing.

I doubt that the majority of people that work for Mercedes drive their cars.

You’d be surprised on both counts. Union factory workers face significant pressure — as in slashed tires — from their peers not to drive foreign vehicles. Auto makers give sizable discounts to their employees.

Funny how you put outright vandalism that would cause hundreds of dollars of loss in such an understated manner (face significant pressure).

You should perhaps be more optimistic. ;) Mercedes has a program for "Jahreswagen" ("Year cars") where employees get cars at something like cost, drive them for a year, then can hand them back to be resold. There are a lot of these in Germany. It's popular way to get a nice car without paying the full cost of a brand new vehicle. [0]

[0] http://www.expo.be/en/jahreswagen/index_nl.phtml, lots more info if you read German.

I live near the Tesla office near Arastradero Road. The last time I rode my bike by and paid attention, there were very few Teslas visible in the parking lot ( though one cannot see very far in the lot from the street due to the terrain/landscaping).

If memory serves, employees at PayPal are chastised if they don't use PayPal to buy their lunch in the cafeteria.

That is certainly a possible takeaway. My takeaway is that we shouldn't have one man's hand feeding everyone who contributes to the political and intellectual life of the country.

Any society that can't draw a distinction between marketing and journalism probably doesn't have a long shelf life. In the past, news orgs could enforce a firewall between news and advertising, and advertisers generally respected it as a norm (to the point that allowing advertising to influence news/editorial would cause a scandal). For a variety of reasons -- declining profitability of journalism, the existence of powerful platform monopolies, and the nature of attentional economics on the web -- those norms have eroded, and society is the poorer for it. (Ironically, I think WaPo is actually more insulated from this kind of interference, just because any direct interference would land on Bezos' doorstep rather than Amazon as a corporate entity).

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