Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price resigns
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/technology/dan-price-resi...
This already is a huge red flag in my opinion.
Criminal charges really should be kept out of the media until there’s enough evidence to jail the suspect. This is to protect both sides.
That's why some countries in the EU, and the UK, have laws protecting the identity of people until after sentencing. E.g. in Bulgaria only their initials can be used, and no photos are allowed. In the UK, they just vaguely describe them (footballer from Manchester in his 20s accused of sexual assault).
While I don't know about the recent stuff there seems clear evidence he was sketchy financially re the original setting salaries to 70k thing. He claimed he did that and then his brother and fellow shareholder sued him for doing it but really the brother launched the suit before that happened objecting to him paying himself a $1m+ salary and hence grabbing the profits and making all salaries $70k was probably a reaction to the suit. Source https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gravity-ceo-dan-pric...
Here is one article sharing the details after the lawsuit with Dan and his brother. People should do more research before blasting opinions. It is terrible what the US is allowed to share and spread buyer to gain more article clicks!
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/dan-price-70k-ceo-prevails-sui...
Given how anodyne (even if sometimes vapid) most LinkedIn activity is, it’s quite a feat of obnoxiousness to get yourself blocked on LinkedIn, of all places.
(I actually think he is likely an abuser, etc., and it seems like the 70k thing was in response to a lawsuit, but c'mon I really doubt he waterboarded anyone.)
Everybody is flawed, damned everybody, including yourself.
And the most extraordinary people are, Often the less acceptable in term of social norms they are too.
- The Most brillant CEOs are often terrible family Dad and with psychological/narcissist problems.... Still they are giving people jobs and making the world a better place.
- Many Brillant scientists have asperger syndromes and are asociable nightmare for the people that work with.... Still brillant scientists that make the world a better place.
- Many authors have self-destructive syndromes and chronic depression affecting their close relative. Still they wrote amazing piece of art.
Same for actors, authors, philosophers, producers, political figures.. your neighbor, everybody.
Nobody is ever perfect even close to this fake perfect public image hero they try to create.
That apply to Dan Price too, whatever he did.
Maybe it is time to grow up America and accept the world as it is.
> Maybe it is time to grow up America and accept the world as it is.
What does that mean?
I think I understand your point - that people like to create hero-narratives that are mostly not true, and that at high levels of achievement some very successful people carry the seeds of their own destruction.
Fair enough. But the Puritan America that you want to grow up is a straw man. And Dan Price is a effectively a nobody, who either assaulted someone or didn’t and as he’s been formally accused, it’s for the courts to adjudicate.
Dan Price is not a nobody.
He is a public figure, frequently in TV and media presented regularly as "The alternative CEO model that arrive to give to his workers excellent working conditions while having a successful and growing business".
And yet, I can bet with you that whatever the judgement of the court will be, the American press will now (opportunistically) vomit on him for the rest of his days.
Should accusations be counted as flaws?
Regardless, the “flaws” this person was referring to were the accusations, and the accusations were of rape not forcible kissing.
'The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.' -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Anyhoo, I have no actual idea if the accusations against Price are founded or not. That's for the courts to decide. I'm not into the whole "trial by Twitter" thing.
Multiple credible accusations, corroborated by contemporaneous accounts, collated by a reputable journalist is definitely enough to call the accusations founded.
Not enough to send people with guns to take away his freedom, maybe, but enough to form an opinion. Otherwise, are we supposed to involve the legal system in every assessment we make of anyone?
Sure the “outrage” is just high level gossip for most people talking about it, but it’s a reaction to this person being a loud and vocal person who was trying to build a public persona of being a Good Guy.
There’s definitely a larger idea here about journalism in general looking for hero stories. But the guy is out there giving the interviews
If you're reading and seeing multiple stories all over the media about what a wonderful, altruistic person someone is, the information as to whether that person is in fact a great guy, or whether he's a predatory scumbag who is exploiting the media to make himself look great is very valuable. It tells you something about how the media works.
You can be a terrible person and have great ideas/inventions.
Steve jobs treated his family like shit, Nazis made many scientific discoveries, etc.
There is essentially no such thing as "inherent qualities" distinct from their source. Or rather, you can never actually know all the inherent qualities.
Knowledge of the sources history, character, motivations, and intentions is itself one of those inherent qualities.
If someone presents you with an idea, you often don't know if it's a good idea or just looks like a good idea because it was crafted to look good, in service of some unknown ultimate goal that you would not voluntarily choose to support if you knew everything.
Every scam in history is based on convincing a victim to harm themselves. Apparently, inherent qualities can be unknown, unknowable, or hidden. It's too late to contest that. It's already been happening for all of human history, and on every possible scale.
Judging something because the source has a known evil character is not wrong or counterproductive or unfair the way it is judging something because the source has pleasing charisma or lacks it.
If a Nazi says something, it's automatically not a wonderful idea in the first place, even if someone else later says the exact same thing and we all agree it's a wonderful idea then.
It's not wrong or illogical. It's just a slight of hand used by the dishonest (or the merely misguided) to try to make it seem wrong or hypocritical by pointing out only the surface similarity between that and prejudice based on nothing that stands up to scrutiny, when those are actually two very different things.
It's like a less obvious version of crying about being ddnied the freedom to deny others freedom.
Nowadays, exactly the same process you describe, is used to cancel people without proper chance for them to defend themselves. So I would be double careful with "multiple accusations", amplified in mass media and/or social media bubble because this is exactly how mob virtually lynches people in 2022.
I think the point about 'multiple accusers' is fair. People will come out of the woodwork, especially when there's money at stake (from the press or from legal action). Michael Jackson is a good example: undoubtedly he did rape some of those kids, but not all of them. Still, I don't see why this provides an argument against forming an opinion, rather than one for forming opinions judiciously.
Also, look up Jesse Washington if you want to understand what lynching means.
Also, along the same lines, the human memory is fairly easy to manipulate. It's not the air tight SSD we all presume it to be.
As a rule of thumb "follow the money". The fact is there are plenty of CEOs and other champions of Crony Capitalism that would pay good money to see him fall. If Big Sugar can buy off Harvard profs and their research so they blame fat for America's failing health ...Price is definitely fair game. And look...sugar still gets a free pass from most people.
I'm not defending Price. He's got a lawyer for that. Simply pointing out that beneath the surface, the world is a dirty place. When money and the status quo is involved I'm far slower to jump to conclusions.
Journalists build a narrative and then find facts that fit their narrative. If you continue to form your opinions on accusation you will find yourself easily manipulated by those who know how journalism works.
But. It's not journalism.
We need to stop giving that type of behaviour a greater title than it deserves.
An online mob isn’t what put this guy’s behavior in the spotlight - it was the reporting done by a journalist who saw through his program and the actions of women who were willing to go to the police, to speak to each other, and to talk to reporters.
The power of social media that this story reveals is the degree to which presence and popularity can drown out important information. He just kept rooting his horn and everyone forgot what his wife said.
The reality is that the people who get the more noise are just the best marketers
No, that's exactly the reason why trial by Twitter shouldn't be done, you don't know what actually happened.
This is actual human beings approaching legitimate newspapers with fact checking departments and legal departments and risks of defamation lawsuits, providing their stories and attaching their names to it.
Everyone of the entities involved are at risk of being sued for defamation if they are lying in this situation. The fact that people can’t tell the difference between Twitter BS and actual news claims is a true indictment of modern society.
The age of clickbait has reduced these to a farce. I've seen fact-checks that were blatantly false.
There are no reputable papers anymore.
Many accusation are also very nebulous, hard to verify and avoiding anything concrete that could get the person making them get sued for defamation.
Of course, he also could just be an asshole and abuser. We simply can't know.
Here is one article sharing the details after the lawsuit with Dan and his brother. People should do more research before blasting opinions. It is terrible what the US is allowed to share and spread buyer to gain more article clicks!
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/dan-price-70k-ceo-prevails-sui...
Not everyone gets paid software developer salaries.
I mean, a quick look at Glassdoor will show that while they do pay their "minimum" wage workers (which is probably an incredibly small part of their employees given the industry it's in) way above market, they underpay the rest and it is mentioned in almost all the negative reviews.
I'd like to see more people having one name at work, and another for their personal life, and keeping each compartmentalized.
It's legal to do in England for example. You can have as many names as you like, including surnames. To use multiple names for the purposes of furthering fraud or evading the police is illegal though.
Western names are really odd and strange. So many people named after the fact that their grand-grand-grand-fathers did a certain job or people named after the city their forefathers used to live in and stuff like that. We think of names as fixed, but really the only reason they are like that is to support bureaucracy. A fluid relationship with names seems strange and exotic to us, but is far more natural.
The one who needs no ego boost for doing moral things, is often what they fail to claim themselves, i.e. moral.
It's the whole principle around anonymous donor, if you happen to follow it.
Because, as several others here have pointed out, either someone is a Perfect Paragon of Purity, or they are Evil To Be Shunned And Cast Out...and everything associated with them must follow in either case.
What exactly is the business model here? What do they do?
Fixed.
> a conviction in a US court of law for at least the specific crimes alleged, or more serious crimes/charges/convictions of the same nature.
It's the sad reality nowadays that the only people who can speak for the average person and for what's right are compromised in some way... They have to be compromised in order to be allowed to get that kind of reach.
Still, the accusations against him sound kind of hand-wavy... The 'waterboarding' thing sounds bad but if consent was given and it was done out of curiosity or thrill-seeking then there is no crime there.
- Fiat monetary system
- Banks
- Big corporations
- Big tech
- Hedge funds
- Billionaires
- The importance of censorship to prevent misinformation
- Executive bonuses
- Surveillance
- The need for more regulations
- Big government
- Stakeholder capitalism
- Climate change
- Inclusivity
Never say anything negative about them. Only positive but try to keep it realistic, don't go overboard because the algorithms might interpret that as sarcasm. You're welcome.
Even wars happen in a large part because governments can print unlimited money and hand out huge contracts to weapons manufacturers. The government doesn't care about net losses because citizens are the ones who will pay through inflation... So long as the politicians' buddies who head the weapons manufacturing companies can rake in the profits, all is well. But government agendas extend far beyond just wars; they extend to just about every aspect of the economy these days.
Efficient market hypothesis is becoming increasingly irrelevant as government intervention in the economy increases.
Unless you amp it up to the point of irony/satire maybe, so that people would follow it for the comedic effect. But for that approach to actually work, the tin foil powerlevel gotta be a bit higher.
It doesn't have to be some kind of conspiracy, I don't know who you think is doing the "allowing to become successful" here.
It's more likely that a self-promoter conceives of this sort of angle and with a view to pushing it as a gimmick, and that the same personality type is prone to the allegedly selfish behaviour.