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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

> The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally

The end does not justify the means. So what good is a society built on prejudice, harassment, and corruption?

If you can sweep controversy under the rug until such time that it's convenient then good luck ever getting change to occur for the better.

> by getting rid of the organization and making any people behind it anonymous & fungible, you can continue to organize economic activity without painting a target on your face.

Making it anonymous & fungible is only necessary if you're unable or unwilling to stand up for your actions. If you're unwilling to stand up for what's right or are doing something you know is unethical, then what right do you have to the proceeds from your actions?

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What good is a society without due process or presumption of innocence, where a disputed allegation would be punished without proof?

I suspect that at a certain level, corporations must have accountability similar to nations. Right now corporations don’t need to be democratic, they don’t need to allow any type of “freedom of speech” and indeed have strong incentives/prohibitions against it in the case of no-disparagement clauses.

I think people may need to be allowed a vote in the companies they work for/monopolies that service them, and that freedom-of-speech rules for corporations, employees, and customers is likely to follow that of their host nations — not equally free everywhere, but that no-disparagement clauses would be legal in the UK and illegal in the USA, for example.

Do companies apply any of that to employees unless they are a protected class? If they want you gone you're gone for whatever reason they make up if they even make one. You don't get to have a presumption of innocence or due process.

Why shouldnt companies be treated the same way by their employees?

I think we'd all like to see contracts meant to prevent those abuses honored. It's only unfortunate that more of us don't have such contracts.

That's not a court. It's a company. And just like they can decide to hand out golden parachutes to execs accused of misbehaving they could chose not to. That's not the same as punishment by a court of law after 'due process'.

I thought the $90 million was required by a contract. If not, and Google made the decision to offer the money after the accusation, that's different.

(1) it depends on what else was in the contract, I haven't seen the contract but 'being fired for cause' usually triggers a whole pile of clauses that have serious consequences.

and

(2) Google went on to invest in his new venture, which I highly doubt was in the contract no matter when the whole thing went down.

As it is one arm of Google decided to let the man go for cause and give him a golden parachute, and another arm of the company decided to invest in his next venture.

Neither of those read like something bad happening to Andy Rubin. You could fire me any day for any reason you'd like to pick if you gave me 90 million.

> Making it anonymous & fungible is only necessary if you're unable or unwilling to stand up for your actions.

Doesn’t this presuppose “good” people are in charge?

> The end does not justify the means. So what good is a society built on prejudice, harassment, and corruption?

Spoken like someone who was raised in a culture where airing grievances led to getting what you wanted most of the time.

I mean, it's not illogical. There's a reason why the activist archetype is so respected in our society. It gets results!

But the outlook that fuels activists to push things things until they win: "I'd rather burn everything to the ground than not get what I want" is also an incredibly short sighted and selfish way to look at things.

This is the human condition I guess. We take things for granted. Like the stability we've grown up in, so much that we're willing to sacrifice our inheritance [a stable and mostly fair society] chasing windmills.

Luckily we've amassed so much wealth and institutional inertia that I think it'll be a while before it all comes tumbling down.

> This is the human condition I guess. We take things for granted. Like the stability we've grown up in, so much that we're willing to sacrifice our inheritance [a stable and mostly fair society] chasing windmills.

The notion that this is a “stable and mostly fair society” is not self-evidently true. And I suspect that if the question were surveyed, the results would differ dramatically across identity groups.

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