eBay’s Stalking Campaign against a Natick Couple
bostonmagazine.com
bostonmagazine.com
All they did was hire the horrible people and setup the environment where doing horrible things would be not just an option, but the best option to succeed at the goals that they then assigned to those people. They gave these people an enormous budget, and then (apparently) never asked what they did with it.
But hey, they didn't know anything unethical was going on, right?
The statement from eBay is worded strangely, and doesn’t contradict this.
It appears to many of us that once a person hits the CEO of a major company level, a criminal conviction is the one and only thing that can, maybe, bring them down. Anything else and they are provided a soft landing.
As you said, this is what's frustrating. More power should always be tethered to more responsibility. Their tacit authorization of these tactics should have put them on trial as well. But, the more frustrating thing is how quickly these sorts of abuses are forgiven and swept under the rug. It's as if once you get high enough up then society's sunk cost aversion kicks in and everyone suddenly finds it so hard to believe that someone they implicitly gave power to could have done something wrong.
My take is this presents an existential dilemma: what if the people we've given power to aren't the most worthy? It is easier to buy your way out of this by writing off an incident like this as merely a fluke.
The system is broken, and the brokenness is by design.
>“She is [a] biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN,” Wymer responded, adding, “I’ll embrace managing any bad fallout. We need to STOP her.”
which seems pretty explicit to me. "I'll embrace managing any bad fallout" is pretty corporate doublespeak-y, but any reasonable person would understand this as the manager taking responsibility, right?
When this occurred, I was dumbfounded Wenig and Wymer faced no repercussions from what happened. Plausible deniability is quite the cloak.
I could only imagine receiving a funeral wreath for a spouse or having porn addressed to you delivered to your neighbors. Frightening.
ebay strikes me as a company living in the past and squandered what they had built.
YMMV. My neighbors would give me my porn magazines back (or they'd take it and read it themselves) and we'd have a laugh about it. Also the police would laugh at me if I tried to report these things. Pigs and bugs in the mail? Most people would be annoyed and little more.
Everything short of the stalker van only really works on upstanding people in quiet suburbs.
When your trashy neighbors get their tires slashed or get in heated arguments on the front porch you feel confused instead of harassed when funeral wreaths start showing up.
Edit: The scary part to me isn't just what Progressive Force Concepts might do within the bounds of whatever their internal guidelines are. Those are bad enough. But, it looks like a paramilitary organization. The pool of people they hire from is loaded with people that are likely to do whatever they want.
Given that Amazon is just reaching its might now, the real pain for eBay's marketplace has not yet begun.
That means the worst of eBay is yet to come. Be careful of cornering wounded animals.
It made me wonder what other types of sociopaths are working there. A quick internet search reveals lots and lots of pedophiles in related organizations throughout the valley:
https://www.taylorring.com/santa-clara/youth-organization/
Great. One more thing to worry about. Why can’t law enforcement just do it’s job? How is Wymer not already in jail?
> A quick internet search reveals lots and lots of pedophiles in related organizations throughout the valley
Is there another resource or evidence you found? The link you posted doesn't seem to confirm this. It simply lists nation-wide stats about several organizations but not Bay Area specific.
I read recently a perspective that said the real purpose of twitter/social media has been to reveal just how idiotic and corrupt our leadership is all the way up the chain on a minute to minute basis (not just big Bay of Pigs style controversies). We have the richest person in the world tweeting about taking a shit.
It is a travesty that Wenig is not doing hard time right now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28046491 (4 months ago/495 points/139 comments)
And other posts linked from that thread by Dang:
As long as we're on the subject why was this post of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29275416 flagged and this one to the exact same url https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286088 posted 8 hours later not marked as a dupe?
* if a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, reposts are treated as dupes (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
* for a major ongoing topic, deciding whether an article is a new story vs. a dupe of the old story boils down to: does it contain significant new information (a.k.a. SNI: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
* the main thing we care about is: can the new submission support a substantively different discussion than the previous ones?
By those criteria I suppose this is borderline, since (I'll take your word for it) the article contains SNI, but (on the other hand) the discussion will very likely be generically about the original stalking story rather than substantively different based on the new post.
So exaggerated.